Hello Tom, Boris,
Am 25.04.2016 um 19:36 schrieb Tom Rini:
On Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 04:43:14PM +0200, Boris Brezillon wrote:
Hi Scott,
I've recently contributed a lot of MTD/NAND related patches (and intend to continue doing so). Some of them are transversal changes touching the MTD and NAND framework internals, which implies patching all NAND drivers along with the core changes.
All those changes are required to properly handle modern NANDs (MLC/TLC NANDs), and I need them to add proper NAND support to the sunxi platform (and more particularly to the C.H.I.P from NextThing Co.).
So my question is, how should I port those changes to U-Boot? I see that your doing "synchronization commits", but in my case this mean including a bunch of driver specific changes into this "sync commit".
I think it's also worth mentioning that I plan to heavily rework the Linux NAND framework to improve NAND performances on modern NAND controllers and clarify the NAND chip / NAND controller concepts, and other people are also working on merging the BBT code of the NAND and OneNAND framework. Which unfortunately means that we're not done porting invasive changes to U-Boot :-/.
Any advice is welcome.
I suppose my first suggestion would be to sync the kernel back into U-Boot more frequently. With our bi-monthly release cycle it shouldn't be too hard to pick a window to grab the current kernel release and bring it over. I think the more stuff we let build up prior to syncing the harder it will be.
Yes, the same applies for UBI/UBIFS. I have no real strategy yet for this. I think also, we need when doing such a sync a better testframe- work, which tests on ideally a lot of boards the new versions ...
Without this, it is very difficult not to break existing boards with such a sync ... especially MTD is tricky, I think, because a lot of boards use it ...
I know I am nerving with my tbot [1], but it is may a solution for this.
Also, as the UBI/UIFS case may show, it is not always a trivial job to do such a sync, as concepts in Linux changes ...
bye, Heiko [1] https://github.com/hsdenx/tbot