[PATCH 0/9] Switch internal registers address to 0xF1 on Armada 370/XP

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Wednesday 22 May 2013, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:
> > More importantly, you can build a kernel with any number of other SoCs
> > already, and if you have a combined ArmadaXP+OMAP+Highbank kernel,
> > there is no way to get a working early debug output.
> 
> So you're proposing to add two Kconfig options, one to have the UART at
> 0xd0012000 and the other one to have the UART at 0xf1012000. The user
> would have to know whether he is going to boot with an old bootloader
> or new bootloader, and select the appropriate option. This means that
> the mvebu_defconfig would no longer be able to have earlyprintk enabled
> by default, otherwise the resulting kernel may not boot for some
> people, but maybe it's a reasonable tradeoff.

Yes. It may also be reasonable to use the CP15 hack for DEBUG_LL, but
I would not like to see that information getting used anywhere in the
kernel outside of DEBUG_LL. That should really come from the DT.

> > > > As you already admit, using the CP15 register is a hack. It sounds
> > > > to me that a cleaner approach would be to put the correct address
> > > > into the device tree and use that value everywhere, rather than
> > > > hardcoding one or more addresses.
> > > 
> > > I don't see how this can fix the problem. Which internal register base
> > > address do we put in our Device Tree source in arch/arm/boot/dts? The
> > > old one? The new one?
> > 
> > The one matching the boot loader for that board, i.e. the new address
> > for all boards but Mirabox and OpenBlocks.
> 
> And what happens when Globalscale (Mirabox manufacturer) or Plathome
> (manufacturer of OpenBlocks) release a new bootloader version, based on
> the new bootloader from Marvell, which remaps things at 0xf1000000 ? Or
> when those people boot from Barebox, which remaps at 0xf1000000 ?
> 
> Conclusion: you can't classify on one side boards that are at 0xd0 and
> boards that are at 0xf1. It depends on which bootloader each
> particular instance of those boards will be using. Will it be a
> bootloader that complies with the "old" protocol (CP15 bit cleared and
> registers at 0xd0) or the "new" protocol (CP15 bit set and registers at
> 0xf1).
> 
> So we can't encode into the boards Device Tree whether the registers
> are at 0xd0 or 0xf1, because it's not a board-related information, but
> a bootloader-related information.

The new boot loaders will of course know that they are remapping the
registers, so they are also able to put the correct information into the
DT.

	Arnd