On Thursday 16 July 2009 17:00:00 Matthias Fuchs wrote:
Any other good ideas about this naming welcome. :)
We called this command "sbe" on our PMC440 (440EPx) and upcoming PMC405DE (405EP) board. I must admit that I forget its meaning. Probably something like 'setup bootstrap eeprom'.
If you already forgot what it's supposed to mean, then it definitely is not a good name. Better a bit longer and more descriptive.
I like 'sbe' - it short and I even gave it a meaning :-)
But unfortunately not specific enough for a "common" command.
I think we are talking about a generic 4xx command to write data into the EEPROM that is read by the bootstrap controller. But I do not care about the name ;-)
But it works a little mit different that the bootstrap command.
It would be great if you could merge/consolidate such 4xx custom commands into this common one.
I was a little inspired by the sequoia code that also comes with a bootstrap command. So please don't ask me to merge it into common code. But your finger on your own nose.
OK. But if your "sbe" command is "better" than the current bootstrap one, then let's see if it makes sense to use your command as the common one.
Dirk's approach is very generic. Putting nothing but the EEPROM data and a descriptive table into the board file is what we need. I only suggest to add an additional label to each entry that is used instead of using numbers and I'd to pass this label as argument instead of the a number. One could use the numbers as labels also :-)
When you do no pass the argument we could either print the descriptive texts as menu (as DIrk did so far) and wait for input or just print the texts as kind of help and the must supply an argument if he want to change something (I prefer the latter).
Does you command support more features? What's the main difference?
Much simpler. Just call sbe with a descriptive argument like a CPU frequency or something like '667-66' on a 440EPx target with 66Mhz PCI clock or 'sr-test-only' for something you will remove later :-). This has two advantages over just using numbers: You can remove configurations without making the following configs in the table moving to the front and its a little more secure meaning you have to type a couple of valid character to reconfigure the clocking. Just using "bootstrap 5" is error-prone.
Ack.
Well, I like my syntax and behavior, but I do not want to totally dismiss Dirk's idea as long as I can keep my sbe command :-)
Seems that "your" command is not so bad. ;) I'll take a look at it tomorrow. Perhaps we can use some of your ideas in such a new common (PPC4xx) implementation. :)
My implementation is nothing but ar if-!strcmp-else-if-!strcmp implementation. But putting things together is a good idea.
Matthias
Thanks.
Best regards, Stefan