Q about bootstrap support for at91sam92* boards and proposal for retirement

[Ahmad Fatoum]

Hello Sam,

On 09.01.22 19:38, Sam Ravnborg wrote:
> Hi all.
> 
> This little detour started because Ahmad pointed out I had made
> a stupid mistake in pwm-atmel.
> So I decided I wanted to give it a spin to verify if it actually works
> now.
> 
> The first challenge I encountered was that said driver had bit-rotted
> as it used the old pwm framework - so I updated it from the Linux
> kernel.

Ouch. How did I miss this :/

> I have the code locally - but this time I will not have it posted before
> it is tested.
> 
> Then I cloned the latest at91bootstrap - but they no longer support old
> at91sam92xx CPUs.
> So it was time to enable bootstrap support for at91sam9263.
> 
> In the past I had something working, but alas no luck this time.
> 
> Can anyone (Ahmad?) help me a little how to get the bootstrap
> functionality working on the at91sam9263?
> 
> I do not expect patches, but I hope for something that can point me in
> the right way to do it.
> 
> I have skov-arm9cpu boards (plenty - as they are mostly retired by SKOV)
> and one at91sam9263ek where I can test.

The skov-arm9cpu looks like it already runs first stage without at91bootstrap?
So the issue is only with at91sam9263ek?

> We see very little interest in at91sam92* boards and we could decide
> to retire all the boards that are not updated to multi-image.

As long as it works, I guess most people don't see a reason make interest
publicly known.

> This could simplify things - and if there is interest the missing boards
> can be brought back to life provided they are updated to multi image.
> Any comments on this?

I have only worked on SAMA5D3 and SAMA5D2. Of course, I'd like to see
board code in AT91 replaced with DT-enabled/multi-image-compatible code,
but I don't think it will happen. I don't think the maintenance burden
is high, so I'd just leave it as is. If it bitrots and people complain,
we can nudge them into the right direction.

> I am happy to type the patches - and verify that the boards I have works.

Great. Looking forward to more boards in at91_multi_defconfig.

Cheers,
Ahmad

> 
> 	Sam
> 
> 


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