[PATCH 14/15] board: ti: Add j721e_beagleboneai64_* config fragments and env file

[Andrew Davis]

On 11/3/23 2:06 PM, Nishanth Menon wrote:
> On 13:51-20231103, Andrew Davis wrote:
>> On 11/2/23 7:38 PM, Nishanth Menon wrote:
>>> Add defconfig fragments for J721E based BeagleBone AI-64 and
>>> corresponding customized environment.
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Nishanth Menon <nm at ti.com>
>>> ---
>>>    board/ti/j721e/beagleboneai64.env        | 19 ++++++++
>>>    board/ti/j721e/beagleboneai64_a72.config | 55 ++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>>    board/ti/j721e/beagleboneai64_r5.config  | 19 ++++++++
>>
>> Beagle boards are not TI boards, add the board support to board/beagle/
> 
> Huh, why bring in commercials and organization changes here? am335x
> and am62 are under the TI umbrella.
> 

The SoCs used are yes, the boards are not, we only make our EVM/SK
line of boards in house.

We did AM335x wrong, in board/ti/am335x/board.c we tried to support
like 11 different boards in one file. And while it might have made adding
our own extra EVMs easier, it only made things less clear for folks trying
to add their own AM335x based boards[0].

We don't integrate support for any other board partner like this. Our
friends over at Toradex or Phytec are currently upstreaming boards based
on K3 SoCs and in doing so have shown us some areas we can improve.

We focus on these little short-cuts to make adding our EVMs (or boards
that look like our EVMs) easy. But that only leads to extra work and
code duplication for external boards.

If something is actually common to the SoC then lets move it to
arch/arm/mach-k3/j721e. Tricks like board-variants.c only hide the
issue and doesn't help folks wanting to add their boards based on our
SoCs to their board/<vendor>/ directory.

Andrew

[0] See "Software Design" https://jaycarlson.net/embedded-linux/#am335x

> $ git grep beagle board/|cut -d ':' -f1|sort -u
> board/ti/am335x/board.c
> board/ti/am335x/board.h
> board/ti/am57xx/board.c
> board/ti/am62x/beagleplay_a53.config
> board/ti/am62x/beagleplay_r5.config
> board/ti/am62x/MAINTAINERS
> board/ti/beagle/beagle.c
> board/ti/beagle/Kconfig
> board/ti/beagle/led.c
> board/ti/beagle/MAINTAINERS
> board/ti/beagle/Makefile
> board/ti/j721e/beagleboneai64_a72.config
> board/ti/j721e/beagleboneai64_r5.config
> board/ti/j721e/MAINTAINERS
> board/timll/devkit8000/README
>