[U-Boot] [PATCH] Separate EBV Socrates board from Altera Cyclone 5 board

Tom Rini
2013-11-12T15:25:13Z

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 10:56:29AM +0100, Detlev Zundel wrote:
> Hi Michal,
>
> > On 11/11/2013 09:33 PM, Tom Rini wrote:
> >> On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 08:26:02PM +0100, Pavel Machek wrote:
> >>
> >>> Altera Cyclone 5 board is very different board (big, rectangular,
> >>> expensive) than EBV Socrates (small, circular, cheap) board. Different
> >>> parts are used there, too, but same configuration of u-boot works on
> >>> both. Nevertheless, printing wrong name confuses users.
> >>>
> >>> Therefore this splits the configuration so that u-boot knows they are
> >>> different. So far it is only used for correcting the puts, but there
> >>> may be other uses in future.
> >>>
> >>> Signed-off-by: Pavel Machek <pavel@denx.de>
> >>
> >> Is there any way at run time to tell which board we are on?
> >
> > Why do you care about board name in general?
>
> We care for board names for a very long time in U-Boot and I'd like to
> keep this. I actually expect a sensible board name on any platform that
> I touch. The board name is an important extra information additional to
> the SoC name. So the question is the other way round - since when do we
> _not_ care about board names?

We have a few different and somewhat conflicting concerns right now, and
this particular platform is an example of a few of them:
1) It's not only possible, but desirable (seemingly, in this case) to
support N boards with a single binary. The space-cost is outweighed by
the usability-gain. We're seeing this in Freescale and TI parts, and I
bet if I looked a tiny bit harder, other vendors too.
2) We want to know what particular board we're on, and perhaps even as
part of deployment build something more trimmed down to just what we're
running on.

--
Tom
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