Re: [PATCH v3 1/6] rockchip: move ROCKCHIP_STIMER_BASE to Kconfig

["Paweł Jarosz" <paweljarosz3691@gmail.com>]

Hi Kever,


> Thanks for you hard working on this, would you mind to share what's the
> motivation for support rk3066 and MK808 board?
> RK3066 is an SoC release at 2012, which has been EOL for a long time,
> and MK808 is a product at 2013, almost 10 years ago.


That is true but at least here at Poland there are still rk3066 devices which
you can buy. And i don't think it's an exception. There are known cases
in opensource community of support for hardware much older than 10 years.
I.e. thanks to Linus Torwalds linux still supports EISA FDDI [1].
There are at least a few rk3066a SOC users and in the spirit of
Linus Torvalds' open source principles, adding support for this
platform is the correct step.

RK3066 is a great soc to play with.
I use my MK808 for three years now to keep my 3d printer in contact
with my local network.
I have been using the URZ0350 as a wifi camera for a long time.
And guess what! They don't want to break down.

[1] https://blog.desdelinux.net/en/linus-supports-a-device-by-a-user/

> I'm not object for enable more SoC support on the mainline, and I know
> you have spend a lot
> of time on this, I have do something like this before, but to be honest
> I don't think it's a good idea to add support for
> rk3066 on mainline now.


I do not agree.

As long as the world is using armv7 architecture adding support for SOC
rk3066a is a great and noble idea.
I personally am working on following up on my and Johan's patches by
adding support for writing firmware to these devices, using only opensource
tools like u-boot and rkflashtool. This support can be extended to other
devices such as rk3399, rk3568 and others. So other SOCs can also benefit
from adding support for rk3066a.

I also want to add that Linux actively supports rk3066a [2].
So if linux supports it, U-BOOT SHOULD ALSO!

[2] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/next/linux-next.git/log/?qt=grep&q=rk3066

I appeal to you Kever Yang in the spirit of opensource, don't give up on
rk3066a yet. These devices are there and they work!


Thanks
-Paweł

> I merge the patches from Paweł Jarosz many years ago into rockchip local
> u-boot and make it work,
> I want to make the branch support as much SoCs as possible at that time.
> But later I found there is no people to use
> it, and the U-Boot is getting more and more heavy, old SoC support is
> the one part people want to clean,
> for it always bring in more '#if, #else' or something like this clean up
> series patches, and more terrible thing is how to
> always maintain the source code works on the old hardware. I do make
> everything work for a long time at first,
> but one day my only rk3066 board is broken, and I'm not able to do it
> anymore.
>
> Thanks,
> - Kever