Hi,
Up until 2023.04 it has been possible to build all the defconfigs but with 2023.07 that changed. Tom mentioned this to me recently.
Up until 2023.04 we can enumerate all the board configs that can be built. We can build any of them using a single name and a single defconfig. The boards.cfg file which buildman creates contains a full list of things that can be built.
From 2023.07 this changes and we now have random .config files
sprinkled about the place. I say random because they are not connected to anything. For example, here is board/ti/am62x/MAINTAINERS:
AM62x BOARD M: Dave Gerlach d-gerlach@ti.com M: Tom Rini trini@konsulko.com S: Maintained F: board/ti/am62x/ F: include/configs/am62x_evm.h F: configs/am62x_evm_r5_defconfig F: configs/am62x_evm_a53_defconfig
BEAGLEPLAY BOARD M: Nishanth Menon nm@ti.com M: Robert Nelson robertcnelson@gmail.com M: Tom Rini trini@konsulko.com S: Maintained N: beagleplay
In most cases the MAINTAINERS file tells us about each board and until [1] I had assumed that was the case. With that patch reverted, these are the only 'orphaned' MAINTAINERS entries (buildman --maintainer-check):
WARNING: orphaned defconfig in board/armltd/vexpress64/MAINTAINERS ending at line 8 WARNING: orphaned defconfig in board/google/veyron/MAINTAINERS ending at line 44 WARNING: orphaned defconfig in board/mikrotik/crs3xx-98dx3236/MAINTAINERS ending at line 7 WARNING: orphaned defconfig in board/st/common/MAINTAINERS ending at line 6 WARNING: orphaned defconfig in board/ti/am62x/MAINTAINERS ending at line 15
But Tom advised me that MAINTAINERS is not intended for this purpose, so the check has been dropped. I am not suggesting we bring it back, necessarily, but if we did, we could use it to specify the .config and defconfig files which are used by each board.
*Failing that*, I suggest a new 'name.brd' file in the board directory to contain this information, e.g.
# Contents of board/ti/am62x/beagleplay.brd: beagleplay-r5: am62x_evm_r5_defconfig beagleplay_r5.config beagleplay-a53: am62x_evm_a53_defconfig beagleplay_a53.config
This could be parsed by buildman and other tools, to produce a list of available boards and to build each using a single name (e.g. make beagleplay-r5_defconfig)
What do people think?
Regards, Simon
[1] https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/uboot/patch/20230803185144.1760729-2-sj...