Re: [PATCH 05/18] powerpc: Wire up 44x little endian boot for remaining 44x targets

Josh Boyer
2010-10-06T01:55:38Z

On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 9:28 PM, Ian Munsie <imunsie@au1.ibm.com> wrote:
> Excerpts from Josh Boyer's message of Fri Oct 01 21:27:37 +1000 2010:
>> > From: Ian Munsie <imunsie@au1.ibm.com>
>> >
>> > I haven't tested booting a little endian kernel on any of these targets,
>> > but they all claim to be 44x so my little endian trampoline should work
>> > on all of them, so wire it up on:
>> >
>> > bamboo
>> > katmai
>> > kilauea
>> > rainer
>> > sam440ep
>> > sequoia
>> > warp
>> > yosemite
>> > ebony
>>
>> I see no reason to do this at all.  If you haven't tested them and
>> there is no demand, there's no reason to wire them up.  Some might
>> actively want to disallow LE mode anyway, like the Warp or Sam440EP.
>
> I wasn't aware that the Warp and Sam440EP disallowed LE mode - I'll
> definitely unwire them and move the ARCH_SUPPORTS_LITTLE_ENDIAN to just
> the sub-arch's that support it.

Well, Warp and Sam440EP are production boards for actual companies.
The rest are all just eval boards. I don't know if the board
maintainers care either way, I was just using them as examples of
cases where someone might.

> As for the other boards, I would like to wire them up if they are able
> to support LE mode - If anyone has one handy I would love to hear if
> they are able to begin booting a LE kernel with these patches, or when &
> how they fail.

I'd avoid anything with an FPU until that gets tested. So no bamboo,
sequoia, canyonlands, etc.

I noticed that canyonlands isn't even covered. I'm guessing that's
because we don't need to create a wrapper for it because U-Boot does
direct loading of vmlinux and the DTB itself. Has anyone done any
work with getting U-Boot to work in LE mode or at least load LE
vmlinux images? The majority of new boards are going to be using
U-Boot and it's ability to load the DTB/FDT, so that would be
something that needs addressing.

josh