[U-Boot] Porting uboot to Broadcom 47xx (MIPS)

[Michael Buesch <mb@bu3sch.de>]

On Wednesday 08 April 2009 00:52:07 ksi at koi8.net wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Apr 2009, Michael Buesch wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I'm the author of the Linux SSB subsystem, which implements 95% of the
> > system
> > bootup code for the Broadcom 47xx MIPS architecture.
> > 
> > I'd like to start porting u-boot to the bcm47xx. (I guess nobody started
> > with this already?)
> 
> Did I miss something or Broadcom (or Marvell) already started giving out
> their datasheets, less for something more useful without 37 NDAs per each
> BGA pin?

Well, there's full sourcecode available for CFE [1] (their crappy bootloader)
and there's a datasheet for the CPU and SDRAM controller (and some more).
I think that's enough to get a proper uboot port.

> I don't understand why we accept any code for all those closed platforms
> that no one can even get a rudimentary data without all those NDAs into a
> GPL-licensed U-Boot? Especially for those companies that make helluva secret
> even of mere PHYs, less something more complex...
> 
> If it had been up to me I wouldn't've accepted any of such code into U-Boot.

I don't think 47xx really is a "closed platform".
Yeah, it's not a fully open platform, because there's little active support
from Broadcom. But there's lots of code and even some documentation around
for this platform.

Don't confuse bcm47xx with bcm43xx.


[1] Modified unofficial fork of CFE:  http://bu3sch.de/gitweb?p=cfe.git;a=summary

-- 
Greetings, Michael.