New layerscape/aarch64 board

[Mathew McBride]

On Sat, Feb 13, 2021, at 2:13 AM, Michael Walle wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am looking into how to bring openwrt support for my board
> (Kontron sl28) upstream. The board has upstream support in
> both vanilla linux (since 5.8) and vanilla u-boot. Someone
> in IRC told me there will be a new release based on 5.10 after
> the 21.02 branch is created. So that would be a nice fit.
> 
> I'd have thought the board will fit it linux/layerscape but that
> is the vanilla kernel with all the NXP lsdk patches on top of it,
> which my board doesn't need and frankly speaking I don't want. The
> same is true for the uboot-layerscape package. Thats the LSDK
> version.

Hi Michael,
I/we (Traverse) also have layerscape boards that run OpenWrt.

When the layerscape target was first introduced (~2017), most of the drivers for these SoCs were not in mainline linux yet.

Since then, the situation has changed, the newer SoCs (e.g DPAA2/LS1088/LS2088) are very much complete (and in some ways, better) in >=5.10 and the others are not far behind.

I understand there are some edge cases, such as the DPAA1 (LS1043/LS1046) Ethernet drivers in mainline were a 'clean' rewrite of NXP/Freescale's long standing 'Netcomm' driver  and have different performance and features to mainline.

I would put forward the following options:

1. For future OpenWrt releases with kernel >=5.10, stop using LSDK patches, or only pick the required patchset for SoCs not in upstream (e.g any new Layerscape SoCs that are introduced)

I suspect the size of the NXP LSDK patchset will decrease signifcantly when rebased onto >=5.10 so this problem may solve itself.

and/or

2. Introduce a generic 'armv8' target for systems that have 'block storage' (SATA/MMC/NVMe), targetting U-Boot distroboot and ARM EBBR(EFI), which would look a lot like the existing x86 target.

I did have a go myself at introducing an 'armserver' target for EFI boot a while ago, this was before x86-64 EFI support was introduced.
There were suggestions that it should go into 'armvirt', though the existing armvirt/32 target may not share the same goals.

Boards that boot from flash (ubifs) or have special requirements (such as bundling the RCW/ATF) could continue using the individual targets.

Regards,
Matt


> 
> Thus, does anyone have an idea where I should put my board. It
> really looks like the "layerscape" is tailored to the NXP eval
> boards.
> 
> It should really have been a layerscape-lsdk in the first place.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
> In theory it should be possible to have a generic armv8 board.
> Which only differs in the device trees. But that would mean
> the kernel image will bloat over time. I don't know if that is
> a major issue, given that most aarch64 boards should have
> enough storage and memory.
> 
> -michael
> 
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