Dear Wolfgang,
thanks for your prompt feedback.
On Tue, Jan 22, 2008 at 10:18:39AM +0100, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
- I have submitted two rounds of our patches (with about one year in between those two instances), and I have the feeling that the interest in even commenting to those patches was quite low. This is not very encouraging for further submissions.
Please don't mistake missing feedback for missing interest. There *is* interest in your patches, and care will be taken that your patches get processed as they should. Promised.
We do habe an ARM custodian problem that needs to be solved soon, but this affects all ARM contriobutions, not only yours. So please don;t take it personally.
I know the problem, both specifically and general to FOSS projects, as I have worked in many of them ;) So I know it isn't personally, but then also I personally don't think that my patches are more important than anyone elses...
- the s3c24xx chipset family support in u-boot is minimal and outdated.
It's outdated because nobody feeds back patches. This is a chicekn and egg situation, and if you work on this platform it's you who could solve it.
yes and no.
do some extensive re-work. Since there seems to be nobody who cares a lot about that family of chips (most products based on them, even if they run linux, don't use u-boot), I see quite a bit of reluctance to merge those patches. Furthermore, I have zero clue if there still
I am not reluctant. Please go on and post patches. U-Boot will not spread if we don;t use it, or if we don;t make our changes available to the public.
I agree that at least the core s3c24xx stuff should go mainline, no question about that.
Pther users of such processors will not use U-Boot *because* support for these chips is "minimal and outdated".
that's true. btw: Samsung is now shipping some (old, outdated) fork of u-boot with their later smdk2443 and smdk6400 boards. Obviously the code is neither clean nor suitable for submission, nor was it ever even submitted :(
But 2443 and 6400 are beyond what openmoko has done so far anyway, so this is not competing.
is any living person out there who is trying to run u-boot on a s3c2400, and we certainly have no way of testing whether the new code
This is wrong. There is tens of thousands of systems running in the field.
yes. I was thinking of 'people who develop new products and are looking for a bootloader'. The 2400 is discontinued for quite some time...
breaks any of the old code. It has actually come to a point where I'd volunteer to maintain the s3c24xx chipset code in u-boot, if anyone was interested in that
You are welcome. Is this a serious offer? I think it might help to solve at least some parts of the ARM dilemma we're in.
I'm serious about this, yes.
At least for 2410/2440/2442, I have quite extensive experience after all the hacking at OpenMoko. I'm familiar with the smdk2410, qt2410, smdk2440, qt2440, neo1973_gta01 (s3c2410), neo1973_gta02 (s3c2442b) and hxd8 (s3c2440) boards, and I can contribute board support for all those to u-boot. I'm also in contact with what Ben Dooks (Linux s3c24xx maintainer) is doing on the mainline kernel side.
- Some of the changes, notably the sd/mmc driver for s3c24xx was rejected by the u-boot list, since it just does what everyone else does: no shared host controller code, just copy+paste the bits that the other sd/mmc controllers do. While I understand that there is a need for a shared sd/mmc code, putting the burden of creating such code on us is just too much. With this kind of requirement you will unlikely to see anyone merge another sd/mmc controller driver into u-boot, since everyone evades creating the generic/common code. This is not pure laziness, but inexperience with the code and lack of access to all the different hardware
Well, someone has to go ahead...
yes, of course. But you need somebody who is voluntarily committed to doing a generic sd/mmc stack for u-boot. It's no use to try to push/force people who have only the time to write a host controlelr driver into doing it ;)
Ok. Give me a bit of time, and I'll do another round of s3c24xx/openmoko/neo1973 related patch submissions.
Cheers,