[U-Boot] Cavium Octeon support for u-boot

[Alexander Graf]

On 08/22/2018 12:00 AM, Suneel Garapati wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 21, 2018 at 5:57 AM, Alexander Graf <agraf at suse.de> wrote:
>> Hi Aaron,
>>
>> On 08/21/2018 08:07 AM, Aaron Williams wrote:
>>> The Octeon version of U-Boot is based off an older versin of U-Boot
>>> (2012.07)
>>> with a lot of features backported. For example, I have backported NVME
>>> support
>>> as well as the latest filesystem code. Since there have been significant
>>> changes to U-Boot (i.e. 64-bit support) that were missing at the time it
>>> would
>>> be a massive undertaking to support the current U-Boot with Octeon or to
>>> push
>>> the Octeon support upstream. While in general the changes to the core
>>> U-Boot
>>> were fairly minimal for Octeon, there were significant changes to board.c.
>>>
>>> Hopefully we can get OcteonTX pushed upstream, however, since we are
>>> tracking
>>> the current U-Boot releases. I'm not sure how to go about doing this,
>>> since I
>>> would basically need a branch that I can maintain.
>>
>> What help exactly do you need here? We already do see partners shipping with
>> random downstream versions of U-Boot on Octeon TX and every time I see them
>> missing out on amazing efi_loader fixes, a tiny fraction of my heart dies
>> :).
>>
>> So I would really like to see Octeon TX support simply developed fully
>> upstream. That way your partners (and again their downstreams) can base on
>> upstream U-Boot versions and are not tied to particular older versions that
>> may be lacking features or bug fixes.
> I maintain U-Boot for Octeon TX platforms at Cavium, which is based on
> v2018.01 currently
> and also tracking future releases.
> efi loader support could be added but lacks customer use case as of now.

Just because the message didn't get to you doesn't mean no customer has 
a use case for it :). In a lot of cases people do a list of options 
first and then evaluate.

SLES for example will require either SBBR or EBBR compliance for target 
platforms. Fair enough, we're a partner and not a customer. Given the 
stressed notion security (and that means updates and timely fixes for 
known vulnerabilities) is getting across the whole market thanks to 
Spectre, I'm fairly confident you'll see more requests coming in sooner 
rather than later. We already see heavily increased interest on SLES in 
industrial embedded today.

> Upstream effort, atleast, for OcteonTX may kick off soon.

That's great to hear! I'll be happy to help out in whatever way I can 
(and time permits).


Alex