[U-Boot-Users] NAND support [was: Port U-Boot to SBC-2410X]

[Ladislav Michl <ladis@linux-mips.org>]

On Thu, Sep 01, 2005 at 01:05:54AM +0200, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> > Patch against "testing-NAND" branch can be found here:
> > ftp://ftp.linux-mips.org/pub/linux/mips/people/ladis/u-boot/u-boot-nand.diff
> 
> Can you please either send this by e-mail, or put it on a server that
> actually works?

Hmm, something strange had happened, that server is very stable,
backuped with diesel generator... Well, it works now. You might be
interested in other patches in u-boot directory, all of them should be
in your queue anyway.

> > It also contains support for new board NetStar (it is not meant to be
> > included - I want to maintain it outside U-Boot, but I'd agree to put it
> > into "testing-NAND" branch for reference), which shows sample
> 
> If I add it to "testing-NAND" (and it makes a lot of sense if this is
> a working example) then it will go more or  less  automagically  into
> the main tree as soon as I merge branches. Is this acceptable to you?

Yes it is, but for sure I'll explain why I didn't want it to be accepted
into mainline. Code in board/netstar runs only on one of many CPUs found
in NetStar PBX. It is hardly possible to write code which will make that
piece of hw act like PBX without hardware documentation and for other
applications it is damn expensive toy. That's why I think there is no use
of it for others, more boards means more worries when maintaining code
and (nothing personal) patch acceptance speed makes it uninteresting for
me. Moreover I basicaly made U-Boot act as second stage loader to allow
safe upgrades, because one day I'd like to use yaffs2 filesystem and
U-Boot currently doesn't support that. Thus I do not see any single
advantage of integrating netstar code into mainline. Of course patch
will be still avaible to conform with GPL.

> We will have to go through this when switching the code base.
> 
> > Ideally old and new code should be able to coexist. Please let me know if you
> 
> But only one version shall be in the main branch at a time, i. e. one
> day the new code will replace the old one, and then all  boards  will
> need to be converted.

Sure. My point was to allow incremental conversion, without breaking
support for yet unconverted boards.

Best regards,
	ladis