Dear Aaron,
In message 201011121345.22528.Aaron.Williams@caviumnetworks.com you wrote:
I am rather new to U-boot development and will be working on migrating the current Cavium Octeon U-boot code to a much more up to date version but I first have some questions.
Welcome! I really appreciate that step.
One of the first things I came across is that we need some significant changes to some of the MIPS specific libraries and start-up code. Should I just create separate files under arch/mips/xxx or should I create subdirectories for the Octeon platform like how it's done for the PowerPC?
We should in a first step split the current arch/mips/cpu/ into arch/mips/cpu/au1x00/ and arch/mips/cpu/incaip/; common stuff should go to arch/mips/lib/.
In the second step, you could add a arch/mips/cpu/octeon/ directory.
These changes would be global across the Octeon and not board specific. A number of the changes are required for handling multiple cores.
Down the road we would also like to add our own replacements to some of the functions provided by U-boot to speed it up on our platform, for example taking advantage of the hardware CRC and decompression features.
Fine.
Also, what would be a good stable starting version to work from?
Top of tree. Your code will be picked up by Shinya Kuribayashi and then pulled from his u-boot-mips repository into mainline. If it should turn out that you generate a lot of commits for a longer time (i. e. more than just an initial pile) we can as well give you a separate u-boot-octeon repository. Just let me know when you feel that would help you.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk