Hello Chris,
Am 15.05.23 um 05:18 schrieb Chris Johns:
On 6/5/2023 2:02 am, Gedare Bloom wrote:
On Fri, May 5, 2023 at 9:02 AM <o...@c-mauderer.de> wrote:
Hello Gedare,
thanks for taking a look at the patch set.
Am 05.05.23 um 15:56 schrieb Gedare Bloom:
On Thu, May 4, 2023 at 9:01 AM Christian Mauderer
<christian.maude...@embedded-brains.de> wrote:
Hello,
this patch set for the arm/imxrt BSP family updates the SDK files to the
latest version of the mcux-sdk from NXP and prepares the BSP for further
chip variants. I plan to add a BSP that uses the IMXRT1166 soon.
As a base for the mcux-sdk files, I now use the NXP git repository
instead of zip files that can be downloaded from NXP. I kept the exact
file system structure to make future updates simpler.
To import the files, I used a script. It is not a clean script and it
was only tested on a Linux machine. Despite that, I added that script to
the BSP directory in case someone else ever wants to update the
mcux-sdk. Updating the SDK is also possible without the script. It's
just a lot more manual work. So if we don't want a script in that state
in the repository, I can also just keep it on a private branch.
I would recommend that you document the import/update process for the
SDK in this BSP (or family) documentation. You could provide a stable
external link to the script there instead of including it in the
rtems.git tree. I'm not convinced that including scripts etc in the
same tree as the source they manipulate is a great practice. It seems
to violate separation of concerns.
Disadvantage is that the script (and documentation) is a bit less simple
to find. But that's not a problem for me (I know where to search) so I
will adapt that.
De we have an official preferred stable location? Otherwise, I think
either a small repo in my https://git.rtems.org/christianm or a repo on
github should be a good place (most likely the later one).
This should be fine. ftp.rtems.org should also be usable (in theory)
The patches that import the new SDK files (patch 0002) and remove the
old ones (patch 0004) are too big for the list. I'll only send the
summary. You can find the full patches here:
0002:
https://gitlab.com/c-mauderer/rtems/-/commit/2a871672767a95598e5af42373bfebd3eb9440d3
0004:
https://gitlab.com/c-mauderer/rtems/-/commit/2a3e104fa808d7f34a1930344d7b39d11cf39f3d
The complete patch set is on this branch:
https://gitlab.com/c-mauderer/rtems/-/commits/cm/20230504_imxrt/
At the moment, I import the support files for all currently available
i.MXRT* variants. The headers for the CPU registers are really big (a
few megabytes per header) which makes the complete source tree of the
mcux-sdk bigger than 90MB. If preferred, I can remove most variants and
only keep the ones that are currently used or will be used soon
(IMXRT1052 and IMXRT1166) to reduce the size.
Thanks, I think this is fine. The increase in the number of HAL/SDK
that we have to import is starting to concern me in general. I wonder
if there is a better way to manage these external sources.
I think I have a language problem here: Is it fine that I push 96MB or
is it fine that I reduce the size of the patch before pushing?
My apologies, I missed this also. If it's not that much more work, it
might be best to remove the unused variants. We don't like to carry
around dead code in the repo as another general rule.
In this case I only updated the existing HAL with more chips, but I
agree that having a better solution to manage HALs than the
clone-and-own approach would be great.
One possible solutions could be to use subrepos. We can clone the lib to
the git.rtems.org, add necessary patches and add that as a subrepo. If
an update is necessary, patches can just be rebased on the latest
version of the upstream lib. Another one could be something like the
west tool that is used in Zephyr. Maybe can also make it simpler to
include libs with vendor specific licenses.
But approaches like that will have a big impact on how to handle a lot
of tasks in RTEMS. For example you would have to init submodules before
building BSPs. The submodules have to be handled during release. And a
lot more. So we shouldn't discuss that as a side note to a patch set but
rather as a new mail thread.
Agreed.
Do these HAL systems provide stable API interfaces? If so is all RTEMS needs to
interface to is the API headers?
Chris
I think that depends a lot on the vendor. In my experience, the better
HALs are mostly stable. For example, I don't think that the ST HAL
changed the API in the versions that I know. And during the update of
the NXP SDK I didn't note a breaking API change either. Only addition of
new functions.
The HAL provides basic drivers. For example in the i.MXRT BSP I use it
for stuff like setting up clocks or adding drivers like serial, I2C or
SPI. I expect that at least some drivers are necessary to link every
program. So without the HAL, the test suite wouldn't build. As far as I
know that would be something new in RTEMS that the tests can't be built
without external dependencies.
I don't have a problem with a change like that, but it is something that
would have a quite big influence on workflows and how we plan to handle
similar cases in the future.
Like said to Gedare: If we want to discuss possible solutions in detail:
Please let's start a separate thread that doesn't target NXP HAL only
but HALs in general (ST HAL, ARM CMSIS, NXP HAL, ...). Should I write a
mail starting a discussion?
I don't expect that we find a solution for that before the next release.
Therefore, I still would like to apply the v2 of the patch set, which is
just an update of the currently existing HAL in the BSP. Of course if
someone suggests a better solution that can be included in the release,
I'm happy to update the patch set to that solution.
Best regards
Christian
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