[U-Boot] Removing the need for boards.cfg

[Masahiro Yamada]

Hi.



On Fri, 1 Aug 2014 12:48:44 +0100
Simon Glass <sjg at chromium.org> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> At present, as a work-around, we generate boards.cfg if needed. This
> is quite a slow process since each board config must be fully
> processed.
> 
> What can we do to improve this? We only need a small number of options
> in order to start buildman - things like CONFIG_SYS_ARCH,
> CONFIG_SYS_CPU, etc.
> 
> I wonder if we could run a script which adds these to the defconfigs
> for each board and then apply a patch to mainline? Would that require
> removing the options from the config.h files? Or could we do that
> later as a separate step?
> 


We cannot add CONFIG_SYS_ARCH, CONFIG_SYS_CPU, etc. to defconfigs
because they are not user-editable options.
(They must be always selected in correct combination.)

This is already discussed when I posted the RFC version of the Kconfig series.


We can easily do

[1] Choose boards by arch

  Just grep  CONFIG_ARM=y, CONFIG_MIPS=y, CONFIG_SANDBOX=y  in defconfigs

[2] Choose boards by board name

  It is the file name of defconfigs




My question is, do we really need to choose by CPU, Vendor, SoC ?
I know they are useful.
For ex. nvidia developers probably want to build only Tegra boards.



One possible idea I come up with is to have 'board group' in .buildman file
so people can build only boards they are interested in.


Something like this:

---------->8---------------

[board-alisa]
tegra20:  harmony seaboard ventana
tegra30:  beaver
tegra114: dalmore
tegra124: venice2
tegra:    tegra20 tegra30 tegra114 tegra124

-----------8<---------------


With the settings above,


"tools/buildman/buildman  tegra20"
is the same as
"tools/buildman/buildman   harmony seaboard ventana"


"tools/buildman/buildman   tegra"
is the same as
"tools/buildman/buildman    tegra20 tegra30 tegra114 tegra124"
and also the same as
"tools/buildman/buildman    harmony seaboard ventana beaver dalmore venice2"



We have to setup  ~/.buildman at the first run.
(and modify it when adding new boards)

Better to provide a tool to auto-generate .buildman file?



Best Regards
Masahiro Yamada