Re: [PATCH 00/13] This patchset aims to add initial support for the i.MXRT10xx family

[Giulio Benetti <giulio.benetti@benettiengineering.com>]

Hello Arnd, Jesse, All,

Jesse and I have answered together, but I’ve missed 1 point below

> Il giorno 25 ott 2021, alle ore 00:21, Jesse Taube <mr.bossman075@gmail.com> ha scritto:
> 
> Hello Arnd,
> 
> Giulio is in CC
> 
>> On 10/24/21 3:32 PM, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>>> On Sun, Oct 24, 2021 at 5:40 PM Jesse Taube <mr.bossman075@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Add initial support for the i.MXRT10xx SoC family
>>> starting with the i.IMXRT1050 SoC.
>>> This patchset contains:
>>> - i.MXRT10xx family infrastructure
>>> - i.MXRT1050 pinctrl driver adaption
>>> - i.MXRT1050 clock driver adaption
>>> - i.MXRT1050 sd-card driver adaption
>>> - i.MXRT1050 uart driver adaption
>>> - i.MXRT1050-evk basic support
>> 
>> Can you expand the description a bit more so it makes sense as a changelog
>> text for the merge commit? It's fairly rare these days that we add support for a
>> MMU-less platform, so it would be good if the introductory text answers
>> questions like:
>> 
>> - what is this platform used for, and what is the purpose of running Linux on it
>>  in place of the usual RTOS variants?

I’ve forgotten to mention the reason of Linux here before with Jesse.
I think that someone could find an easier ready to go environment with Linux(and Buildroot as build system), not that much for graphics but for all the utilities starting from bash.
Graphics can anyway benefit from qt lite or other lightweight library statically built.

This SoC is used around the world with MCUXPRESSO and it’s the nxp answer to stm32f7 more or less.

A private company already provide a commercial Linux 4.5 BSP for it(we’re rewritten from scratch), so I think this means that someone is interested.

>> 
>> - are you doing this just for fun, or are there any commercial use cases?
> 
> The purpose of this is for learning and fun, as far as we know there are no
> commercial use cases, but we hope there will be.

At the moment there is no request, but because of upstreaming maybe there could be.

> 
>> - what are the minimum and maximum memory configurations this has
>>  been tested with?
> 
> We both have only tested with 32MB of ram on i.MXRT1050/60-evk.

Those 2 SoCs can expand up to 64MB.

> 
>> - what user space are you testing with: any particular distro that supports
>>  this platform, and do you run elf-fdpic or flat binaries.
> 
> We are using Buildroot[1] and that only uses flat binaries.
> i.MXRT1050/20 have already been up-streamed to U-Boot[2].
> 
>> - are you planning to also support the newer i.MXRT11xx or
>>  Cortex-R based designs like the S32S?
> 
> We plan to support the i.MXRT11xx, but unsure about the S32x, it depends 
> on the interest. 
> 
>> 
>>       Arnd
>> 
> [1]: https://github.com/Mr-Bossman/imxrt-linux-buildroot.git
> [2]: https://source.denx.de/u-boot/u-boot/-/blob/master/configs/imxrt1050-evk_defconfig
> 
> Thank you, 
> Jesse Taube.

The rest is already answered

Best regards
Giulio Benetti
Benetti Engineering sas