[PATCH v2 0/4] Better smartphone support (Qualcomm)

[Peter Robinson]

Hey Caleb,

Improve support for running U-Boot on [Qualcomm] smartphones, with:
>

Is there anything in this that is QCom specific? Like should this also work
on the Pinephone phones which have either a Allwinner or Rockchip SoC?


> * A boot menu which can be entered by holding power during boot
> * Hang on panic (so errors can be read on the display)
> * Serial gadget which can be enabled by holding volume down or via
>   boot menu
>
> In its current form, U-Boot's boot menu is perfectly adequate, however
> once an option is picked U-Boot will never return to the menu, always to
> the CLI.
>

I wonder if it makes sense to make this a generic option selectable by
Kconfig.


> On a phone (with no keyboard), dropping to the CLI effectively makes the
> device unusable until manually rebooted, since there is no way to run
> any commands...
>
> To rectify this, let's revive CONFIG_BOOT_RETRY for the hush parser and
> add an option CONFIG_RETRY_BOOTCMD to run the contents of "bootcmd".
>

Is there a way to do this without hush, a bit of thinking out loud by with
this hush makes less sense, and compiling it out has the plus of it not
being available from a security PoV.


> This provides for a flexible menu system which we can enter and exit.
> See qcom-phone.env in patch 1 for more details.
>

This over all sounds like a good way forward.


> Finally, provide some rough-ish documentation to describe how Qualcomm
> phone support works and outline some debugging steps for when UART and
> the framebuffer are unavailable.
>

Can we make that generic phone?

I have both of the pinephones, I can likely try this id there's no specific
qcom-isms, or if there's specific features I need to be aware of I can see
what they're missing at least.


> ---
> Changes in v3:
> - Minor wording/clarification improvements in docs
> - Introduce CONFIG_RETRY_BOOTCMD rather than changing the default
>   behaviour.
> - Enable some more gadgets in the phone config fragment.
> - Link to v2:
> https://lore.kernel.org/u-boot/20241004-qcom-phones-v2-0-c7ab67ac3043@linaro.org
>
> Changes in v2:
> - Fix CONFIG_BUTTON_REMAP_PHONE_KEYS name in qcom-phone.config
> - Add Tom and Simon to CC
> - Link to v1:
> https://lore.kernel.org/r/20240831-qcom-phones-v1-0-08614edd8e35@linaro.org
>
> ---
> Caleb Connolly (4):
>       board/qualcomm: introduce phone config
>       cli_hush: support running bootcmd on boot retry
>       bootretry: check for bootretry variable changes
>       doc: board/qualcomm: describe phone support and bringup
>
>  board/qualcomm/qcom-phone.config |  17 ++++++
>  board/qualcomm/qcom-phone.env    |  49 ++++++++++++++++
>  boot/Kconfig                     |   7 +++
>  boot/bootretry.c                 |   2 +
>  common/cli_hush.c                |   6 +-
>  common/cli_hush_upstream.c       |   6 +-
>  doc/board/qualcomm/board.rst     |   5 ++
>  doc/board/qualcomm/index.rst     |   1 +
>  doc/board/qualcomm/phones.rst    | 122
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  9 files changed, 211 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
> ---
> base-commit: 78f8c8c58f7d3f7c3a26af4afbd08aba21c14c90
>
> Caleb Connolly <caleb.connolly at linaro.org>
>
>