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

[Masahiro Yamada]

Simon, Tom,



On Fri, 1 Aug 2014 09:38:03 -0400
Tom Rini <trini at ti.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 01, 2014 at 09:22:42PM +0900, Masahiro Yamada wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> For me, I don't see CPU or Vendor as super important but SoC is.  I'll
> often be doing some TI work for say am335x or am43xx and be checking
> over those two board configs but once I'm done (or nearing done) I need
> to build for SoC==am33xx to catch all of the other vendors that have
> boards in the family.
> 


If MAKEALL/buildman is invoked without any arguments
(which means build all the board),
boards.cfg is not necessary in the first place.

It that case, can we skip generating boards.cfg ?
(We can get the board list by 'ls configs' )


We need a database only when we want to select boards by CPU, Vendor, SoC.


Best Regards
Masahiro Yamada