Hi,
Am 15.06.2018 um 00:36 schrieb patrick patrick@wylight.de:
Hi there,
I am Patrick one of the new guys. I don't have much to show off right now, but I thought it might be a good idea to tell you what I want to do within the next days.
Today, I took the u-boot branch "letux-2016.11" from git://git.goldelico.com/gta04-uboot.git
and started to rebased it on top of v2018.05 of mainline git://git.denx.de/u-boot.git
Nice!
I was able to complete all merges, but v2018.05 is still not able to compile letux_lc15_4gb_evm_defconfig. I expect it will take some time to convert all the legacy CONFIG options to Kconfig.
Yes, that is the key problem with these upgrades/rebases.
Call me crazy, but I strongly believe in mainline. And in my opinion it is the only possibility to keep our software maintainable.
I almost agree for normal software, but there is an exception: the bootloader.
The reason is that we have limited resources and therefore should to do the important things. Now, the bootloader is important, but does rebasing from e.g. 2016.11 to 2018.05 give us new features we need or are missing?
For me the boot-loader should be touched on only rarely and only if it is missing something (e.g. better 4GB support). And then be released after careful testing. If we would apply a rolling rebase model (like we do for the letux kernel) it binds a lot of time to do the tests... And not to forget how to rollout u-boot updates to users and support them if something went wrong.
In my experience with u-boot it takes approx. 5 years that there is something significantly new so that investing some months of upgrading, fixing bugs and polishing is warranted.
Last time we did this with letux-os was 2016. There we got the problem that our 2013 u-boot was not able to be extended to handle OneNAND (for a different device than the Pyra). And it did not support OMAP5...
So this was a good point in time rebase and fix and extend the code. But then we did leave it as is. Especially because the config system was in the middle of being upgraded and there were experiments with device tree in u-boot. So we decides to "never touch a running system".
But Ido not want to say that your efforts are of no use. They are useful to learn how to do this upgrade and prepare for a moment when we need it.
If I succeed and build a current u-boot for the pyra. My next step would be to split pyra support into small pieces and send them step by step to mainline.
Yes, that is a good idea. The more is in mainline the less patches we need...
I know that is a hard way, but trust me it is worth it. Especially for a device like the Pyra, which should live for years and is not obsolete within a few month.
Well, u-boot 2016.11 (or any other version) isn't as well.
Currently all my work is just local, but as soon as something is working or someone else shows interest in my work I can push it to: https://dev.pyra-handheld.com git://git.goldelico.com/gta04-uboot.git
if you need write access at some point, please contact me.
or github
git://git.goldelico.com/gta04-uboot.git is mirrored to https://github.com/goldelico/gta04-uboot
Nice dreams, Patrick
p.s.: Same timezone as ED but I need more sleep than him.
I do as well :)
On 14.06.2018 23:55, aTc wrote:
On 06/14/2018 04:32 AM, Michael Mrozek wrote:
This question is probably mostly aimed at aTc:
Right now, you only provide precompiled U-Boot binaries in the OS. Nowhere on gitlab have I found where the sources for those are.
I think the current one is based on the one here https://dev.pyra-handheld.com/notaz/pyra-u-boot
Im not entirely sure, because, as with the kernel, there have been quite a few different versions of the pyra uboot. I wanted to have a bootmenu, and an easy way to have the os configure boot options for multiple kernels, so i had a version of the letux uboot with extlinux enabled, zmatt did some fixes , and then notaz took all of the stuff and added a few more things, and it ended up on there. Not much has happened to it since then. It's probably horribly out of date with the letux uboot now.
I have checked and it was branched off after 31 jul 2017. Since then there are just 10 patches in letux-u-boot. Only the last two are Pyra related (Tony's 4GB patches).
pyra-u-boot got 13 patches on top of the branch point. I have looked a little into them and some are obviously good for inclusion. Some may need a little discussion (e.g. noop-patches like "support palmas").
So as soon as I find time, I will go through them.
BR, Nikolaus