[U-Boot] [PATCH 4/5] e1000: New "e1000" commands for SPI EEPROM management

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear "Moffett, Kyle D",

In message <0EF7E520-FF4A-435F-AF2A-0D47C0951B34 at boeing.com> you wrote:
>
> > Eventually this should not even be linked with U-Boot, but kept
> > separate as lodable module, like eepro100_eeprom.c, smc911x_eeprom.c
> > and smc91111_eeprom.c.
> 
> Hmm, there seem to be some fairly significant functionality differences
> between this e1000 driver and those other EEPROM drivers.

I did not claim otherwise.

> In particular, those other eeprom drivers simply have a single hardcoded
> I/O base address that they assume is properly mapped, IE:
> >   struct eth_device dev;
> >   dev.iobase = CONFIG_SMC911X_BASE;
>
> That won't really work with the way the existing E1000 driver is set
> up; it expects to run with full PCI device access using the standard
> U-Boot PCI calls.  It seems to get very confused if you poke at the
> hardware behind its back.

I'm not really sure how this is related to the EEPROM access part of
the code.  This is functionally separate from the network driver,
isn't it?

And I don't really see where the EEPROM part needs to be PCI aware.

> Finally, from an actual operational standpoint, this EEPROM driver is
> designed to allow the user to program up to 64kB of information to the
> E1000 EEPROM, including manageability firmware and other stuff; speed
> and copy-to/from-memory operations are very important.

These should be important to all kinds of drivers.

> The other EEPROM "apps" only really support changing individual bytes
> one-at-a-time and reprogramming the MAC address, which is insufficient
> for initial hardware load.

I wonder if we could / should unify all this code.

> If you agree then I will modify the patch to move the new code into a
> separate e1000_eeprom.c file which is conditionally compiled, but
> still linked into the main U-Boot image.

That's OK with me. [As long as it remains optional.]

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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