On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 06:39:18PM +0200, Maxime Ripard wrote:
On Fri, Oct 20, 2017 at 08:54:43AM -0400, Tom Rini wrote:
> If it's a false one, then I guess Red Hat doesn't have any kind of > custom defconfigs for Fedora or RHEL for the kernel?
kernel is part of the distro, "firmware" (ie. u-boot or whatever implements UEFI) should not be.. so this argument is a bit of a red herring.
Then that discussion is entirely moot. If the distros don't care about building the U-Boot binary, why should they care about maintaining the U-Boot's defconfig like Peter was suggesting?
You're taking that and turning it around wrong, we currently have to care about building it. Ultimately what we'd like is to not have to care. One is the current status quo, the other is future desire!
Then we're back to the previous question you didn't answer. If you have to build it, why can't you have a custom defconfig, or a configuration fragment like Rob suggested, like you do for the kernel?
Because the goal is that boards ship from the manufacturer with a firmware that's "good enough". And firmware updates are handled by Someone Else, rather than the distro.
We're talking about a vendor that ships today a U-Boot build that either doesn't have DT support, or doesn't start the kernel in the proper execution level which prevents any mainline kernel from running.
Maybe it's just me being too pessimistic about this, but do you really expect to see a time where they would ship a bootloader with EFI?
There's actually a relative lot of vendor stuff that's based on "only" 2 or so year old U-Boot, and starts to get things right. So yes, once you start to factor in the design->production lag, we will start to see more and more devices that come out with these features enabled and either in-use (because it's relevant to the product) or community-used (because the product can be end-user-used and it's not something that was turned off). And we're starting to see more and wider silicon vendor support coming in and in my experience there's often a lot of "if the vendor defaults work, just add what we need on top" in custom designs. For the kernel and U-Boot both.