[U-Boot] New to U-boot development, adding Octeon support

[U-Boot] New to U-boot development, adding Octeon support

[Aaron Williams]

Hi,

I am rather new to U-boot development and will be working on migrating the 
current Cavium Octeon U-boot code to a much more up to date version but I 
first have some questions.

My goal is to be able to hopefully submit the changes back into the main U-
boot tree and do this as cleanly as possible.

One of the first things I came across is that we need some significant 
changes to some of the MIPS specific libraries and start-up code. Should I 
just create separate files under arch/mips/xxx or should I create 
subdirectories for the Octeon platform like how it's done for the PowerPC? 
These changes would be global across the Octeon and not board specific. A 
number of the changes are required for handling multiple cores.

Down the road we would also like to add our own replacements to some of the 
functions provided by U-boot to speed it up on our platform, for example 
taking advantage of the hardware CRC and decompression features.

Also, what would be a good stable starting version to work from?

-Thanks.

-Aaron Williams

[U-Boot] New to U-boot development, adding Octeon support

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Aaron,

In message <201011121345.22528.Aaron.Williams@caviumnetworks.com> you wrote:
> 
> I am rather new to U-boot development and will be working on migrating the 
> current Cavium Octeon U-boot code to a much more up to date version but I 
> first have some questions.

Welcome!  I really appreciate that step.

> One of the first things I came across is that we need some significant 
> changes to some of the MIPS specific libraries and start-up code. Should I 
> just create separate files under arch/mips/xxx or should I create 
> subdirectories for the Octeon platform like how it's done for the PowerPC? 

We should in a first step split the current arch/mips/cpu/ into
arch/mips/cpu/au1x00/ and  arch/mips/cpu/incaip/; common stuff should
go to arch/mips/lib/.

In the second step, you could add a arch/mips/cpu/octeon/ directory.

> These changes would be global across the Octeon and not board specific. A 
> number of the changes are required for handling multiple cores.
> 
> Down the road we would also like to add our own replacements to some of the 
> functions provided by U-boot to speed it up on our platform, for example 
> taking advantage of the hardware CRC and decompression features.

Fine.

> Also, what would be a good stable starting version to work from?

Top of tree.  Your code will be picked up by Shinya Kuribayashi and
then pulled from his u-boot-mips repository into mainline.  If it
should turn out that you generate a lot of commits for a longer time
(i. e. more than just an initial pile) we can as well give you a
separate u-boot-octeon repository. Just let me know when you feel that
would help you.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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