[U-Boot] [PATCH v2] misc: add gpio based status led driver

[Scott McNutt <smcnutt@psyent.com>]

Hi Wolfgang,

Thomas Chou wrote:
> On 04/25/2010 06:32 AM, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
>>
>> I mean, which board in U-Boot uses this code? I didn't find any.

I think the most accurate answer is both "all" and "none" ... and
I'm not trying to be funny or disrespectful in any way. It's just
so very easy to replace peripherals with these FPGA based systems.

>> The convention is not to add unused code. If there are no real users
>> for this, the patch should be delayed until a board gets added that
>> actually uses it.
>>
My understanding is that the nios2 linux folks make use of the
peripheral that this driver supports. However, the peripheral is
not a standard Altera peripheral. In any case, it can essentially
be used on any nios2 board as a replacement for the stock PIO
peripheral.

> These nios2 boards are now supported with the nios2-generic board 
> approach, like that of microblaze-generic, instead of adding every nios2 
> board to u-boot mainline. The nios2-generic board patch was applied to 
> Scott's next branch.

Correct. I asked Thomas to remove this peripheral from the Altera
board tree because it was not associated with a _standard_ Altera
peripheral. That is, anyone using the default configurations
from Altera will never use this driver.

However, the nios2 linux folks are very likely to use it (as a
replacement). And, when they build u-boot, it will probably be
configured using the nios2-generic board. So this isn't a rabbit
in the hat ... the code will used. It's just not directly tied
to a particular PCB from a traditional point of view.

Regards,
--Scott