[U-Boot] U-boot Porting

[Andreas Bießmann]

Dear sayed zahid,

On 05.07.2012 13:42, sayed zahid wrote:
> Hi ,
> I have basic knowledge of porting u-boot to a new board. But now i have got
> a task to port u-boot on cavium mips based board. As i know that mips
> architecture is already supported, but will it support all cavium octeon
> mips variants?

I guess no. I had to work with some non mainlined version of u-boot
provided by cavium a year ago (or something around that). At that time
we got a

---8<---
abiessmann at azuregos % git grep U_BOOT_VERSION include/version.h
include/version.h:#define       U_BOOT_VERSION  "U-Boot 1.1.1"
--->8---

:(

AFAIR there was a lot of basic stuff missing in mainline U-Boot to get
Cavium mips64 running at that time so I didn't start to port these
proprietary changes (well it would not have been accepted the way it was
written down; beside that cavium forced us to sign a NDA for that piece
of GPL code).

I have not followed their open source efforts since then, but I saw a
lot of work on the linux-mips list by David Daney and I think Aaron
Williams is working for Cavium too and is on this list. Maybe one of
them can comment?

> Please put some light on this. I would be glad if you guys,
> give my some idea to where to start with or suggest some documents which
> will help me understand and port on a new architecture

You should not hesitate to contact their support and ask for proper
mainline support of u-boot ;)

Enough Cavium bashing.

Regarding your question for documents, I'm sorry I can not help you
here. I recommend start working with some mainlined device which is
comparable, get firm with the architecture, try to find commonalities,
get the new cpu in u-boot step by step.

Best regards

Andreas Bießmann