Hi!
Wolfgang's advice is valuable and noted. However, it is in Altera's best interest that we have 1 central gathering point for all our opensource software support.
Full agreement here. But I would like to point out that your point of view appears to be biased: U-Boot mainline is a community project, and the community is very much vendor-independent. So the question we're trying to solve here is not what is optimal for Altera, but what is optimal for the community.
As is, current mainline U-Boot is not really working well on most SoCFPGA systems.
I would disagree on this. U-Boot with basic features is working well on Altera dev kit. I believe it works well for Pavel too as I recall from his emails. From his latest watchdog patch, seems he is able to boot to kernel too.
I'd not characterize latest mainline u-boot as "working well". I hit some obscure problems (time running 1000x too fast, low memory not working, linux not starting) and was not able to get it working in reliable way.
In my eyes it was pretty predictable: when the port is without mmc and ethernet support, there's no surprise it bitrots.
Linux still does not reliably start for me :-(.
Now, don't spend too much time staring at [rfc] patch, there should be split up version later today.
While for SPL, I would admit its bit slow. But almost all the essential drivers were there except the SDRAM. This has been dragged for long due to the legal discussion between GPL and BSD-3. I believe you are part of this length discussion too :) But this is resolved now after persuading our legal team. Hopefully we can send out the SDRAM patch soon.
Good, so things are getting better. Pavel