[U-Boot] [STATUS] v2009.11-rc1 is out

[Detlev Zundel]

Hi rhabarber1848,

>> Grepping through my source, I cannot find such a configuration - do you
>> plan to submit this support here sometime?
>
> the code was written by other people and is maintained out-of-uboot-tree 
> in our public CVS.

So why not move mainline?  Usually it's pretty fun to get other peoples
code into mainline *lol*

> After unpacking U-Boot 2009.08 these files are copied into the source 
> tree: http://cvs.tuxbox.org/tuxbox/boot/u-boot-tuxbox/

Ah uh, I would even offer some help in the process (like adding a branch
in the u-boot-testing repository), but this instruction is somewhat
unspecific, i.e. I see three boards being supported.  If we want to get
the support mainline, we should start with only one of them - including
only the neccessary changes, i.e. cpu/ppc4xx/serial_sicc.c is very
likely not relevant for the dbox :)

> Then this patch is applied
> http://cvs.tuxbox.org/tuxbox/cdk/Patches/u-boot-2009.08.diff?view=markup
>
> This is the board config used:
> http://cvs.tuxbox.org/tuxbox/cdk/config/u-boot.dbox2.h.m4?view=markup
>
> I do not know if the code meets U-Boot coding standards, but it works ;)
> Adding the code to the U-Boot tree makes sense but I think I do not have 
> the needed skills to support it in the future.

You will learn the skills while doing it - no problem.

>> Apart from that, I'd strongly start looking for implications of the
>> recent rewrite of the relocation strategy to code not in mainline.
>
> Ah, this is the message I was waiting for. After 2009.08 I did not follow 
> the coding process due to lack of time so I am sure I missed something. 
> Do you mean "[TESTING PATCH] ppc: Relocation test patch" from Sep 12th?
> Btw, I am using gcc-3.4.6.

This is a rather long story, but it starts with this commit:

commit 858290178f222d998b6425d85cf06822467918f3
Author: Peter Tyser <ptyser at xes-inc.com>
Date:   Mon Sep 21 11:20:25 2009 -0500

    ppc: Enable full relocation to RAM
    
    The following changes allow U-Boot to fully relocate from flash to
    RAM:
     - Remove linker scripts' .fixup sections from the .text section
     - Add -mrelocatable to PLATFORM_RELFLAGS for all boards
     - Define CONFIG_RELOC_FIXUP_WORKS for all boards
    
    Previously, U-Boot would partially relocate, but statically initialized
    pointers needed to be manually relocated.
    
    Signed-off-by: Peter Tyser <ptyser at xes-inc.com>

On top of this many fixes have been provided already.  Just grep for
"relocat" in "git log".

Cheers
  Detlev

-- 
These days, even the most pure and abstract mathematics is in danger
to be applied.
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