Hi,
On Sun, 13 Mar 2022 at 06:41, Paweł Jarosz paweljarosz3691@gmail.com wrote:
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=...
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.
Actually we have much older devices in U-Boot than that! The key thing is to have someone maintaining the board.
Regards, SImon