[U-Boot] [PATCH 00/14] Nokia RX-51 support

Marek Vasut
2012-03-04T20:57:23Z

Dear Pali Rohar,

I suggest you to read through this whole mail properly, do not get angry by the
first few lines.

> U-Boot on Nokia N900 is broken due to bug in MMC and framebuffer driver.
> See: http://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2012-January/115778.html
> http://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2012-March/119330.html
>
> Until now *nobody* responce to the first reported problem (2 months old). I
> will not do anything with Nokia N900 U-Boot code until both problem will be
> fixed!

Firstly, we are very grateful for properly reported bugs!

Yet you probably misunderstood how whole this free software/open source thing
works.

If you found a bug noone else noticed, you are not ever supposed to expect
people on the mailing list to fall on their backs, drop everything they are
doing and start fixing your problem. This is because they didn't observe any
trouble and so this has no priority for them.

And this is especially true for out-of-tree ports. N900 is good example of such
category.

Now if you actually report a bug to the mailing list and this bug goes unnoticed
for an extended period of time, you're supposed to send subsequent email in
order to alarm the people on the mailing list the bug report is still relevant.

In case of U-Boot and Linux kernel, there is a list of maintainers in the
MAINTAINERS file in the source tree, you are supposed to put these people in the
Cc of such reports, this will greatly improve your chance of getting response
and help. In case of U-Boot, there is also a list of custodians available here:

http://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot/Custodians

But considering you are yourself a software engineer, the best approach to the
problem you're observing is to actually debug the issue you're seeing and submit
a patch for it. Next, fix your patches for N900 and submit them. It'd be a good
idea to put a note in the patchset cover message that this depends on your
previous fix.

Now, to the problems you're observing:

1) Video; check if you have the following defined in your board config:

#define CONFIG_VIDEO
#define CONFIG_VIDEO_SW_CURSOR
#define CONFIG_CFB_CONSOLE
#define CONFIG_VGA_AS_SINGLE_DEVICE
#define CONFIG_SYS_WHITE_ON_BLACK

I understand that you probably want to second and the last define from the list
above, which solves your "invert" problem and swcursor problem.

2) MMC; I believe Tom can comment on this one.

On a final note, I believe you should adjust your behaviour towards the mailing
list. The U-Boot project, as well as many other FOSS projects, is a collective
effort to achieve the best possible result for everyone. But for such model to
work, everyone must first give and take only afterwards and never too much.

Best regards
Marek Vasut