Submitting patches for Kontron-boards with Freescale processors

Submitting patches for Kontron-boards with Freescale processors

[Claus Gindhart]

Kumar,

in our department we have Linux 2.6 kernel ports for Kontron embedded computer boards with freescale processors 8245, 405, 8540, 8541, 8347, 8270, ...

We would like to start now to submit all these board supports to the vanilla kernel.

For the start we would select one of our common boards, e.g. the one with 8540/8541 processor.

My question is now:
Should we try to provide a patch with all HW-features of the board supported, or would it be better to start with a minimalistic patch, and then add support for additional devices onboard (e.g. IDE, RTC, SuperIO, ...) time by time ?

Or would it be better to provide the full feature set of this board at one time ?


Mit freundlichen Gruessen / Best regards

Claus Gindhart
SW R&D 
Kontron Modular Computers
phone :++49 (0)8341-803-374
mailto:claus.gindhart@kontron.com 
http://www.kontron.com 

Re: Submitting patches for Kontron-boards with Freescale processors

[Kumar Gala]

On Dec 19, 2005, at 2:07 AM, Claus Gindhart wrote:

> Kumar,
>
> in our department we have Linux 2.6 kernel ports for Kontron  
> embedded computer boards with freescale processors 8245, 405, 8540,  
> 8541, 8347, 8270, ...
>
> We would like to start now to submit all these board supports to  
> the vanilla kernel.
>
> For the start we would select one of our common boards, e.g. the  
> one with 8540/8541 processor.
>
> My question is now:
> Should we try to provide a patch with all HW-features of the board  
> supported, or would it be better to start with a minimalistic  
> patch, and then add support for additional devices onboard (e.g.  
> IDE, RTC, SuperIO, ...) time by time ?
>
> Or would it be better to provide the full feature set of this board  
> at one time ?

First, I would recommend posting such queries to the linuxppc lists  
(linuxppc-dev@ozlabs.org, linuxppc-embedded@ozlabs.org).

Second, I'm no longer at Freescale so please email me at this address.

Ok, now to your question.  In general if a given board port touch  
files in arch/ppc/platforms/* than all of that code should be in one  
patch.  If you are touching anything in drivers/* you need to  
separate out those patches and send them to the respective driver  
maintainers.  If you want to provide a more detailed list of changes  
for 8540/8541 I can provide better directions on how to submit patches.

What boot loader are you using for your boards?  I ask because for  
the 85xx and 83xx subarchitectures I'm trying to limit new board  
ports in arch/ppc as we try to transition to arch/powerpc.  However,  
this requires that the firmware provide a flatten device tree to the  
kernel.

Hopefully that gets you a sense and feel free to ask any other  
questions.

- kumar