Dear Curtis,
first: can you please try to properly quote text included from previous messages? In your posting both your and my text follow interleaved without any marker who wrote what. This is difficult to read for myself (and I remeber what I wrote), but it is impossible to read for others (and it's bad style anyway).
In message FA06AA2C99BCD511951200005A99441003BE170A@IRVEXCH1 you wrote:
There is no relation between the reset vector and TEXT_BASE. You can have the reset vector at 0x100 and TEXT_BASE - say - at 0x40000000. I don't think I want to change this configuration (which seems to be working to several people) without a really good reason.
The reset address is either 0x00000100 or 0xfff00100. The current u-boot configuration doesn't locate any code at these locations. The MPC8260 configuration specified TEXT_BASE as 0xfff00000 and it works. The current u-boot configuration does not boot.
I think you should re-read the section of the processor's user manual about the operation of the memory controller after reset. And it obviously works for the board maintainer plus some other folks.
You can map the flash at any arbitrary address. I don't see why 0xFF800000 would be any better than 0xFE000000 - on contrary - mapping it at 0xFE000000 leaves enough room if there should ever be a board with bigger flash chips.
As long as something responds to the 0xfff00xxx address range you are correct.
After reset it will. RTFM.
You are wrong. There are certain address ranges in Linux which are mapped with virtual"physical 1:1. The IMMR and BCSR areas are among them.
This is very implementation specific. There have been several discussions about the use of BATs with these architectures.
Maybe there were discussions. I don't care. Fact is that the current code requires such a 1:1 mapping, so U-Boot will provide it. It makes no sense to create a configuration that matches some documentation (which uses an arbitrary memory map which is not better than any other memory map) if the result is a firmware that will not be able to boot U-Boot.
For me, the most important thing is that it works. Then it must be clean and technically elegant. The memory map in some unrelated documentation does not play a role in any of these decisions.
I doubt that you have any Linux applications running with your configuration.
I see Linux and u-boot as two very different things. In my opinion it is
You can see it as you like.
But I will not intentionally create a configuration of U-Boot that cannot boot existing Linux kernel code.
useful to have the BIOS follow the documented configuration. This helps the person who is trying to bring up, and probably learn, a new platform. As
It is much more helpful for the person who is trying to bring up a board to try to understand what he is doing, instead of taking one example as God-given and immutable.
configuration. The difference is that they made those changes and didn't need to refer to several documents (or source code) to figure out a memory map. When Linux boots, it assumes the BIOS is brain-dead and reconfigures everything. The BCSR and IMMR will be relocated to what makes sense for that operating environment.
This is NOT correct in current versions of the Linux kernel. At least NOT on PowerPC systems.
Let's stop this fruitles discussion here. The board maintainer configrmed that the current configuration is actually working, and your suggestions are obviously wrong as they will break Linux support.
Your patch was rejected, and this is my final decision on that subject.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk