[RFC PATCH 5/5] board: Add new Samsung "stemmy" board based on ST-Ericsson U8500

[Linus Walleij]

On Sat, Jan 4, 2020 at 6:48 PM Stephan Gerhold <stephan at gerhold.net> wrote:

> The ST-Ericsson U8500 SoC has been used in mass-production for
> some Android smartphones released around 2012.
> In particular, Samsung has released more than 5 different
> smartphones based on U8500, e.g.
>
>   - Samsung Galaxy S III mini (GT-I8190) "golden"
>   - Samsung Galaxy S Advance (GT-I9070)  "janice"
>   - Samsung Galaxy Xcover 2 (GT-S7710)   "skomer"
>
> and a few others.
>
> Mainline Linux has great support for the Ux500 SoC, so these
> smartphones can also run Linux mainline quite well.
>
> Unfortunately, the original Samsung bootloader used on these devices
> has limitations that prevent booting Linux mainline directly.
> It keeps the L2 cache enabled, which causes Linux to crash very early,
> shortly after decompressing the kernel.
>
> Using U-Boot allows to circumvent these limitations. We can let the
> Samsung bootloader chain-load U-Boot and U-Boot locks the L2 cache
> before booting into Linux. U-Boot has several other advantages
> - it supports device-trees directly and we are no longer limited to
> flashing Android boot images through Samsung's proprietary download
> mode.
>
> The Samsung "stemmy" board covers all Samsung devices based on U8500.
> Add minimal support for "stemmy". For now only UART is supported but
> this will be extended later.
>
> Signed-off-by: Stephan Gerhold <stephan at gerhold.net>

Reviewed-by: Linus Walleij <linus.walleij at linaro.org>

Yours,
Linus Walleij