What should be the policy on the tweaking hardware settings in the u-boot bootloader? [safe or not].
As a result of the PCI/Memory buffer remarks, I re-did my tests and I the troubles which required me to disable 3 of the 4 hardware buffers with the register PCMBCR are no longer there (data corruption).
However, since then, my development board died on me and I had to replace it with a new production board which has a later (>1.2) silicon revision of the MPC8245 processor.
Disabling the buffers is safe: it provides a workaround for a possible silicon bug in certain MPC8245 processors. However, it comes at a small (<< 1%) performance cost IIRC [1].
If it should be _safe_; then the patch I sent and is now in CVS should stay; if not, it can be commented out. I think it is still good to leave it in comments though...
Any thoughts?
Marc.
[1] Obviously, I need to re-do these performance tests on a board with does not have the silicon bug (later revision, I am currently trying to trace the exact revision number in our ordering system).