On Sat, Jan 4, 2020 at 6:48 PM Stephan Gerhold <step...@gerhold.net> wrote:
> The ST-Ericsson U8500 SoC has been used in mass-production for > some Android smartphones released around 2012. > In particular, Samsung has released more than 5 different > smartphones based on U8500, e.g. > > - Samsung Galaxy S III mini (GT-I8190) "golden" > - Samsung Galaxy S Advance (GT-I9070) "janice" > - Samsung Galaxy Xcover 2 (GT-S7710) "skomer" > > and a few others. > > Mainline Linux has great support for the Ux500 SoC, so these > smartphones can also run Linux mainline quite well. > > Unfortunately, the original Samsung bootloader used on these devices > has limitations that prevent booting Linux mainline directly. > It keeps the L2 cache enabled, which causes Linux to crash very early, > shortly after decompressing the kernel. > > Using U-Boot allows to circumvent these limitations. We can let the > Samsung bootloader chain-load U-Boot and U-Boot locks the L2 cache > before booting into Linux. U-Boot has several other advantages > - it supports device-trees directly and we are no longer limited to > flashing Android boot images through Samsung's proprietary download > mode. > > The Samsung "stemmy" board covers all Samsung devices based on U8500. > Add minimal support for "stemmy". For now only UART is supported but > this will be extended later. > > Signed-off-by: Stephan Gerhold <step...@gerhold.net> Reviewed-by: Linus Walleij <linus.wall...@linaro.org> Yours, Linus Walleij