On Mon, Aug 04, 2014 at 02:14:13AM +0300, Simos Xenitellis wrote: > Hi All, > > Nicolas (from ARMDevices.net) has conducted quite a few interviews with > Chinese hardware companies around Shenzhen. > There are several videos with Allwinner, such as > http://armdevices.net/2014/07/23/allwinner-64bit-armv8-processor-announced/ > > I think it would be a good opportunity to interview Allwinner about issues > with source code development. At > https://plus.google.com/u/0/+charbax/posts/6uqUutxjQiw (see comments) he is > OK to either mail Allwinner or arrange to visit them for a video interview. > My preference would be an interview on camera and I believe it should be > feasible. > There may not be immediate results out of this, however it would be great > to have some official response. > > What's needed is to describe to Nicolas what questions to ask. > I am not familiar with all important questions that can be asked so it > would be good to help add to the list, and explain to Nicolas so that he > can discuss them at ease. > > Here is my attempt with a question. Feel free to correct me. > > 1. The Linux kernel holds now the hardware description of SoCs in a data > format called Device Tree (DT). There are more details about DT at > http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/petazzoni-device-tree-dummies.pdf > For example, here is the DT file for the Rockchip 3188, > https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/arm/boot/dts/rk3188.dtsi > > While many manufacturers have provided DT files for their products, there > are none yet from Allwinner. > Here we can ask for Allwinner to provide them for all SoCs, or we can ask > specific details that will help to produce those files. Do we have a > preference?
The only thing we need to write those are a good technical documentation and board schematics. Allwinner is only really involved in the former. > 2. Source code in mainline Linux. We explain why it is important, etc. > > There is a list of items (mainly drivers) at > http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort > Are these drivers without any released source code? Has the source code > been released but it needs lots of work to add to mainline? What should we > ask Allwinner to do? I'm not sure to get what you mean, but the drivers that got merged were either: - rewritten from scratch (GPIO, clocks, SPI, etc.) - an adaptation to the Allwinner SoCs of already existing drivers (GMAC, I2C, SATA, USB, etc.) - Allwinner source code cleaned up (EMAC, MMC, etc.) As for the things Allwinner should do, they should move to using standard Linux API. They improved a lot that aspect when developping the A23 BSP, and hopefully will continue to do so. Maxime -- Maxime Ripard, Free Electrons Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering http://free-electrons.com
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