[U-Boot] A little introduction

[Graeme Russ]

Hi Henrik,

On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 1:24 AM, Henrik Nordström
<henrik at henriknordstrom.net> wrote:
> A little introduction to let you know who I am and why I am here.

Welcome, nice to see you pop up here :)

> I am maintaining u-boot support for Allwinner A1x class CPUs, and ARM
> Cortex A8 class SoC by chineese Allwinner Tech.
> http://www.github.com/hno/uboot-allwinner/
>
> To be honest I am not guilty to much of the code. The bulk of the A10
> support was kindly donated by Allwinner via Tom Cubie, including a SPL
> support enabling the A10 boot rom to boot u-boot dir4ectly from sd
> cards. So far for th A10 I have mostly managed to produce failed ports
> to later u-boot versions where SPL crashes and cleaned things up a
> little.

I must make an apology - I had committed to assisting you and Tom in
bringing this port into mainline U-Boot (including investigating the
SPL breakage et. al.). Unfortunately, a few personal issues have
developed which have forced me to put my U-Boot development (and
software development in general) on hiatus. I will, however, still be
floating around on the mailing list and will response (maybe a little
slowly) to emails directed my way. So I will be able to review any
patches that do get posted. I may even pop up now and again on
#arm-netbook and #u-boot, but not for a while.

> For the last couple of months I have been staring at A13, the newer
> little brother of A10, trying to get SPL to work there and now finally I
> have got the pieces together and we have a working (but not optimal) SPL
> for A13.

That's great news. When you say 'little brother', does that imply that
the A13 is a lower-powered/featured device when compared against the
A10?

> Also involved in the free kernel development for Allwinner A1x class
> SoCs and other supporting tools for the SoC family.
>
> Outside u-boot I am the proud father of 6 wonderful kids, president of
> the Squid Software Foundation, and an independent IT consultant focusing
> on Linux & networking.

Wow - I thought I had my hands full.

> Been hacking on computers for more than 3 decades, ranging from demo
> programming, game development, web interfaces, application level
> proxies, kernel drivers, and now back to bare metal in u-boot.
>
> My work on u-boot is done by interest in both the SoCs in question and
> bare metal development, and plan to continue looking after this class of
> SoCs for quite some time.

Good to hear that there are individuals committed to supporting this
hardware. My perception is that we are seeing explosive growth in the
'cheap but feature-full' ARM SoC market. But the consequence of the
amount of competition in the market is that vendor margins are
dropping and, as a consequence, vendors are devoting very little time
to support us. I just wish they would at least produce datasheets that
were more than an over-rated product brochure ;)

I'm looking forward to seeing what eventuates

Regards,

Graeme