[U-Boot-Users] Board/driver bragging list proposal

Thu Nov 6 15:09:25 CET 2003

Hi Wolfgang and the rest of the Gang,

This is a good opportunity for me to trot out a thought I've been thinking for a while, but have not been able to put together as a cohesive proposal.  It would be nice, and the new wiki makes it achievable, to have a feature list where people could identify what whas available and what they felt were the best features (and which implmentations should be steered clear of) which would serve as guidance for newcomers.  Some of this information is in the README file, but it is hard to keep up to date and tends to not warn of lesser implmentations nor point out good implementation.

Before the wiki, it would have been impossible for one person (Wolfgang) to maintain.

With the wiki, it still may not work, because people may not contribute and there is a risk of people getting into "my implementation is better than your implementation" fights.  Hopefully we are all smarter than that.

Another problem is organization: should we organize by processor and board (which is intuitive but not necessarily the best for looking up information) or by feature (flash type, ethernet interface type, SDRAM type, etc.), or by both?  Probably both of the above :-/.

Perhaps we can start a wiki documentation branch by having each board maintainer make an entry for their board in a list, branching to a short description of the board and a list of the features.  The list of features could then branch to a description of that feature, many of which would be shared by several boards as they use the same driver.

This is a crude diagram of what I'm thinking...

board1 --> CPU: MPC8260
           Flash AMDxxxx ----> AMDxxxx flash driver description (shared with board 1,3)
           SDRAM ------------> SDRAM support (fixed type, no auto config)
           FCC ethernet -----> FCC ethernet driver description (shared with board 1,2,3)

board2 --> CPU: MPC8260
           Flash Intelxxxx --> Intelxxxx flash driver description
           SDRAM ------------> SDRAM support (e.g. DIMM with auto config) (shared with board 2,3)
           FCC ethernet -----> FCC ethernet driver description (shared with board 1,2,3)

board3 --> CPU: MPC8260
           Flash AMDxxxx ----> AMDxxxx flash driver description (shared with board 1,3)
           SDRAM ------------> SDRAM support (e.g. DIMM with auto config) (shared with board 2,3)
           FCC ethernet -----> FCC ethernet driver description (shared with board 1,2,3)

Then, for instance, if a legacy board does a poor job of implementing a feature (I'm thinking of the 8245 Sandpoint implementation of I2C, for instance), whoever enters the information or whoever gets burned by it later could enter a warning note for future reference.  Likewise, if a board does something New and Improved and Better than Sliced Bread, the proud implementer could enter brag a bit (and potentially be "modded down" by others in the future :-).

There currently is a board selection box in the DULG wiki
  http://www.denx.de/twiki/bin/view/DULG/BoardSelect
but it only has two boards listed and displays the Denx documentation, not really what I have in mind.  Also, I am thinking more of a whole page list of boards so the user can see all of them (preferably with a feature summary) at once to give him more of a clue where to start.

Once some basic driver information is in, we could also make a top level driver index page, pointing to the drivers so a user could directly look up (all) then AMDxxxx flash drivers, for instance.

Now the problem is, I'm not that familiar with the Denx wiki (sorry, Wolfgang, I just haven't had the time to crawl through it) so I don't know if I'm proposing something that already exists.  If it doesn't exist, I don't know the best place to splice in my proposal.  Also, the proposal will only be successful if most or all the board supporters kick in some effort.

gvb

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wolfgang Denk [mailto:wd at denx.de]
> Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2003 6:35 AM
> To: Richard Klingler
> Cc: u-boot-users at lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: Re: [U-Boot-Users] current simple 8260 platform as start... 
> 
> 
> Dear Richard,
>  
> in message <20031106104512.A52892263 at joshua.klingler.net> you wrote:
> >
> > > All boards use SDRAM, Flash, and Ethernet. Either you 
> chose  a  board
> > > randomly, or you must be more specific.
> > 
> > I'll try (o;
> > 
> > - 4 * MT48LC4M16A2 SDRAM
> 
> bus width?
> 
> > - CF interface
> 
> How implemented?
> 
> > - SO-DIMM interface
> > - BCM6020 DSL
> > - PCMCIA option
> 
> How implemented?
> 
> So you do have a couple of "fancy periphals".
> 
> Sorry, but it is not that easy to recommend a specific board  without
> precise  knowledge  of  your  hardware.  Even  if  you  sent  me  the
> schematics (which I would need) I wouldn't have the time  (for  free)
> to dig into it.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Wolfgang Denk
> 
> -- 
> Software Engineering:  Embedded and Realtime Systems,  Embedded Linux
> Phone: (+49)-8142-4596-87  Fax: (+49)-8142-4596-88  Email: wd at denx.de
> An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while  sweeping  on
> to the grand fallacy.
> 
> 
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