On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 4:59 PM, Mark Brown <broo...@kernel.org> wrote: > On Thu, May 05, 2016 at 09:01:05PM +0530, Amit Kucheria wrote: >> On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 5:15 PM, Marcin Juszkiewicz > >> > Solution for existing SoCs is usually adding 1MB of SPI flash during design >> > phase of device and store boot loader(s) there. But it is so expensive >> > someone would say when it is in 10-30 cents range... > >> > Even 96boards CE specification totally ignored that fact while it could be >> > a >> > way of showing how to make popular board. Instead it became >> > yet-another-board-to-laugh (EE spec did not improve much). > >> > Is there a way to get it improved? At least for new designs? > >> Yes! I've added this suggestion to a list of suggestions for evolution >> of the 96boards spec. > > We already went round the houses repeatedly on that one :(
It's not so dismal as all that! With the board size and price point the CE spec aims at, it is very unlikely that vendors will build boards with a separate storage device for FW.* However, by and large these platforms will be built with eMMC and eMMC has a separate boot area that is logically separate from the main pool. We can add a requirement for future versions to boot from the boot area when booting from eMMC. While on the topic of the spec, we need to handle "optional" items in a better way. Rather than having toothless "optional" requirements. How about we have 2 levels of compliance. Something like "Silver" compliance which covers all the absolutely required items, and "Gold" which also implements the optional items. I bring this up because there are several SoCs that vendors want to build board for, but they many not be able to make the business case for respining the chip to meet an item of the spec. Such as device the SoC boot from. * although anyone who really wants to treat it as separate storage can happily insert an SD card and dedicate the eMMC to firmware -- really, how is that different?. _______________________________________________ cross-distro mailing list cross-distro@lists.linaro.org https://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/cross-distro
