On Friday 17 August 2007, Robin Getz wrote: > On Fri 17 Aug 2007 17:10, David Brownell pondered: > > On the other hand, maybe you want your "typical" customer to > > be more of a systems integrator than anything else. > > We are getting yelled at by our customers (I was on the phone yesterday), > because the kernel build environment we distribute (the default) was not > inside Eclipse, and someone couldn't push a button on a GUI rather than > typing "make".
Press the "enter" button after typing "make". ;) > While Linux and other open source software is free, for some taking advantage > of its benefits can require a significant investment in time. Linux is > powerful, rich, and flexible. It is these very characteristics that make > Linux so appealing that also create a significant level of complexity. Yes. > We are seeing more and more "first time buyers" jumping from bare metal - no > OS, to Linux. For them - the ease of not having to write configuration files > gives them a warm fuzzy feeling when they boot their board, and it > just "works". There's certainly a lot to be said for having things just work the first time when you're making such a big transition in tools. On the other hand, at some point the training wheels need to come off! > > > >That said, how you handle pinmux on Blackfin is your business. > > > > > > > >But you should know that this approach seems idiosyncratic and > > > >more complex than needed: when pin config is done early and as > > > >part of board setup, drivers don't need to care about it or to > > > >handle any pinmux errors. And heck, products can sometimes be > > > >shipped with the bootloader having done all pinmux setup, so > > > >Linux won't need to worry about it at all. That can help ship > > > >multiple board revisions using the same kernel. > > > > > > This works for fixed function boards. > > > > That is, for typical products embedding Linux... > > We have multiple customers shipping the same bootloader/kernel binary on > different products, and the only difference is the /etc/rc file - which > drivers they install, and a few things in userspace. Be careful there. Remember that the driver model is predicated on knowing the devices first, and *then* matching drivers. I expect you *will* see problems if you get people thinking system config comes from a "which driver" selection rather than "here's the exact hardware that's available". Maybe configfs should be used for device config. > Could this be smaller - sure - but NAND is cheap (according to them) compared > to the effort and cost of maintaining and testing multiple kernel versions > for every product. > > Could this be faster - sure - but it is done at init - and then never again. > We have a ~2-3 second boot time - maybe we shave off a few ms - things go > pretty fast at 600MHz. I'm more used to clock rates less than 1/3 that much. :) - Dave - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/