Subject: [PATCH] ARM: atags: add support for Marvell's u-boot

From: [email-masked] (Sebastian Hesselbarth)
Date: Tue, 04 Jun 2013 10:48:51 +0200

On 06/04/13 10:13, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Jun 2013 15:17:31 -0400, Jason Cooper wrote:
>>> Isn't upstream U-Boot supporting Marvell devices properly these days?
>>> If so maybe considering a U-Boot upgrade would be the best way forward?
>>
>> Yes, both u-boot and barebox are supporting Marvell devices,
>
> Sorry Jason, but you're overstating the status of this support:
>
>   * Barebox has only *minimal* support for Marvell SoCs, i.e only the
>     serial console and timers are supported. There is no support for
>     network, NAND, SPI or anything that even allows to load a kernel and
>     boot it.

That remembers me that I wanted to make it boot from DT so we don't
start adding drivers and add DT later on.

>   * U-Boot has zero support for Armada 370 and Armada XP, and Sebastian
>     has tried for several months to push support for Marvell Dove,
>     without success (lack of review/interest from the U-Boot
>     maintainers, if I remember correctly).

True. It took about 2 month for a useful review and then the discussion
was only about naming it orion-something or mv-something. Recently,
someone picked up that patches and reposted them.. but don't expect them
to get in quickly.

> So as of today, the Marvell-specific U-Boot is the /only/ working
> solution for Armada 370 and Armada XP based platforms, and it will
> remain this way at least for several months, until we've pushed enough
> work into Barebox. And even at that time, as you say, users may not
> necessarily be willing to upgrade their bootloader.

Well, there is still the possibility to have board-specific dts files.
If you are stuck for whatever reason with an old boot loader, append a
dtb with MAC addresses set for your board. IMHO, adding workarounds for
every single boot loader just because we don't want anybody to either
update or manually patch the dts is ridiculous.

Sebastian