[GSoC] [ARM] arm cleanup - my own proposal

[Aleksander Dutkowski]

hi Ian!

I sent a proposal of porting FBSD for some board. Whether I will be
accepted or not, I will contribute to at91 as I have my at91 board. I
will send you an email, or you can tell me your irc contact on
freenode or efnet, and I will send you my patches for testing :)

regards,
Aleksander
aleek at freenode, aleek at efnet


On Sat, Apr 14, 2012 at 6:02 PM, Ian Lepore
<freebsd at damnhippie.dyndns.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 2012-04-01 at 20:19 +0200, Aleksander Dutkowski wrote:
>> hello!
>>
>> after few weeks searching for interesting idea for me, I've decided to
>> propose my own one. It is already mentioned on IdeasPage:
>> - ARM cleanup
>>
>> Why I have chosen this one? I am very interested in embedded world.
>> Now I am working on porting FBSD to at91sam9g45 - I will be much more
>> motivated working on arm fbsd project than any other.
>>
>> Why should you let me do that project? While working on freebsd/arm
>> I've noticed places that could be optimized, or separated, i.e.
>> at91_samsize() should be declared for each board separately - now,
>> this function has if-else and checks, which board is he running on.
>>
>> I would like to identify and fix that bugs, so the code will be more
>> efficient and clear. Moreover, I think there should be a
>> tutorial/framework for adding new boards or SoCs, so I will be
>> simplier. I am currently reading the code in sys/arm/at91 and
>> searching for improvements but I will be very pleased, if you send me
>> your insights.
>>
>> The first question is - should I cleanup only at91 branch or more? I
>> am quite familiar with at91 right now.
>> The second - how to test the code? Some of boards could be tested in
>> qemu, I could buy board with at91rm9200 for example, if I'm in. But
>> maybe I will find here people with their own boards, they could help
>> me testing? I havs sbc6045 board with at91sam9g45 SoC but it hasn't
>> fbsd support yet (I'm working on it now :) )
>>
>> I also thought about reducing kernel size for embedded, if arm cleanup
>> won't fit.
>>
>>
>
> I'm curious whether you ever got a reply to this privately, since
> nothing appeared on the list?  I meant to reply and offer to do testing
> of at91 changes on rm9200 hardware, but I was on vacation when you
> posted originally, and I forgot to reply until just now.
>
> It's been my growing impression for about a year that the arm support in
> FreeBSD has atrophied to the point where it can barely be said that it's
> supported at all.  Now I see this morning that marius@ has committed a
> set of style cleanups to the at91 code (r234281), so maybe it's not
> quite as dead as I feared.
>
> At Symmetricom we build a variety of products based on the rm9200, and
> we're maintaining quite a set of diffs from stock FreeBSD.  Some are bug
> fixes, some are enhancements such as allowing the master clock frequency
> to be changed during kernel init (instead of in the bootloader) and a
> hints-based system that allows the atmelarm bus to become aware of new
> child devices that aren't in the stock code and manage their resources.
> It sure would be nice if some of those diffs could get rolled back in;
> it would certainly make it easier for me to integrate things like
> Marius' style cleanups back into our repo.
>
> Anyway, if ongoing changes are going to be happening to the at91 code,
> I'm certainly interested in helping however I can.
>
> -- Ian
>
>