[U-Boot] is it worth contributing a SATA SIL3512 driver to u-boot?

[Michal Suchanek]

On 11 December 2015 at 13:16, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Dec 2015, Fabio Estevam wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 6:19 PM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> wrote:
>>
>> >   well, the contract i'm working on will be using it for porting linux
>> > to a *lot* of older platforms so, technically, i'm that user. :-)
>>
>> What I meant was: if you submit the SATA SIL3512 driver to U-boot,
>> you should also add the U-boot support for at least one board that
>> makes use of this driver.
>
>   short and possibly stupid question -- the fact that there is no
> support for this SATA device in u-boot suggests it's not terribly
> popular. i know little about it, can anyone comment on whether it's
> just obsolete or deprecated or superseded by a newer driver or
> something? i'm just starting to dig through the code now.
>

It seems to be a PCI SATA addon chip. Booting directly from an addon
chip is not immensely useful so long as your main chipset/SoC has any
usable storage to boot from - eg USB or native AHCI. It might be nice
if  your main chipset is not well supported or you want to add support
for many chipsets that all have similar PCI subsystem so you can
easily get at storage using single driver.

Thanks

Michal