[U-Boot] Preparing a patch for u-boot

[Daniel Jabbour]

Hi,

After reading over the U-Boot patch submission guidelines, I want to  
ask the list before I go ahead and prepare a patch. I am working with  
a hardware vendor using the XBurst CPU SOC (system on chip). It's  
basically a MIPS32 compatible CPU with various integrated functions  
made by Ingenic Semiconductor. A number of low-cost tiny laptops are  
using the chipset, as well as some embedded systems.

The vendor has done a reasonable job releasing all their work under  
GPL and getting the boards to run on Linux 2.4/2.6 series kernels.  
They also patched U-Boot to work with their specific chipset and  
boards. The patch is released here: ftp://ftp.ingenic.cn/3sw/01linux/01loader/u-boot/u-boot-1.1.6-jz-20080530.patch.gz

After looking through the patch, it seems to do the following major  
things (against U-Boot 1.1.6):
  * Add board support for the various boards that use their XBurst  
chipset
  * Added LCD support for their boards
  * Add specific CPU code to the MIPS CPU for their XBurst chipset
  * Modified the NAND read/write/erase commands to enable bad block  
handling

My question is essentially: besides updating the patch against the  
latest GIT version of U-Boot, what would you recommend I do with the  
code to assist in integrating it into the U-Boot mainline? I realize  
there are some stylistic changes, but overall, if you could briefly  
review the patch and give me some pointers it would be most helpful  
(i.e. would you like this split into several patches, does the patch  
make any changes that you would not consider for introduction into the  
mainline, etc)? Thank you very much in advance,

Daniel

--
Daniel Jabbour
Software Engineer
Laptouch, Inc.