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

Chin Liang See
2013-11-13T14:39:04Z

On Tue, 2013-11-12 at 16:17 +0100, Michal Simek wrote:
> On 11/12/2013 03:46 PM, Chin Liang See wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > On Tue, 2013-11-12 at 11:17 +0100, Michal Simek wrote:
> >> On 11/12/2013 10:56 AM, 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?
> >>
> >> There could be i2c memory on board where you can find out this information but that's
> >> problematic if it is empty or you want to use this i2c for something else.
> >> For all microblaze boards I use XILINX_BOARD_NAME which reflects hw design
> >> (if user is smart enough board name is the part of hw design name).
> >> For zynq/socfpga sensible solution is probably to load this name for DTS.
> >>
> >
> > Currently, the SOCFPGA SPL is customized through a set of handoff files
> > which located at board folders. These handoff files are generated by
> > tools based on board and user design in FPGA. With that, not much
> > decision being made during run time based on the board. With this
> > handoff and tools approach, it will shield off the complexity of
> > hardware configuration and errors (if user change it manually without
> > tools help). Thanks
>
> Which nice copy of our approach. :-)

Hmmm... is it true? This approach being used since few years back at
NIOS soft processor. Besides that, we are utilizing the SPL framework
for our second stage boot loader. I believe you guys are not using SPL
right? It seems you guys would need tools to generate and even build you
guys own version of boot loader. It creates high dependency for user to
your tools.

For our solution, customer can just grab the code from git and build it
using the normal U-Boot way (if they don't want to use the tools). With
the SPL also, we are taking advantage of open source community power to
make our second stage boot loader more powerful and user friendly to
user. Our user can grab any drivers or leverage the supports from the
open community too. I believe that is the power of open source :)

Chin Liang

> But anyway I believe that you are also generating one macro which define
> name of this configuration based on hw design/board you are using.
> And then you can use this macro for showing board/design name in u-boot.
>
> Thanks,
> Michal
>