Hello everybody,
ARM has always been one of the architectures that generated a big number of different processors and SoCs, but recently the activitiy in this area is literally exploding. This is partially due to the fact that ARM is currently used in many designs, so many new ARM based processors and SoCs and even more new ARM boards show up, but another and at least as important change is that some silicon and board vendors have started to actively pushing their products into the U-Boot (and Linux) mainline source trees (and *welcome* they all are!).
It has become evident that this growing complexity has become way too massive to be shouldered by a single custodian, even a very active one like Jean-Christophe.
I think we have no other choice but to add more manpower to this task, i. e. split the ARM respository and distribute the workload across a few more custodians.
Unline with the Power architecture, where the split can be easily defined by processor lines, with ARM it seems more logical to me to differentiate by silicon vendors.
After much thinking I therefor suggest to implement the following change for the ARM architecture:
master ARM repository: Tom Rix
Atmel (AT91): Jean-Christophe Plagniol-Villard
Freescale (i.MX) Magnus Lilja? Or are there any volunteers at Freescale?
Marvell (PXA + IXP): Jean-Christophe Plagniol-Villard
Marvell (all other): Prafulla Wadaskar
Samsung (s3c, s5pc): Are there any volunteers at Samsung?
Texas Instruments (OMAP): Dirk Behme? Or are there any volunteers at TI?
??? ???
Please let me know what you think about this idea, and if you agree with the suggested persons - resp. if you are one of these, if you would be willing to take such responsibility (be warned: it's a lot of work), and/or if you have other and/or additional ideas.
We are not exactly in a hurry, but I think we should try and get this change implemented before the end of this merge window, so the stabilization period can already be handled by more people, thus hopefully with less stress on any of the (new) custodians.
Thanks to all who helped so far, thanks to all who patiently suffered from delays and other friction, and thanks in advance to everybody who steps up to help.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk