[U-Boot] A little introduction
A little introduction to let you know who I am and why I am here. I am maintaining u-boot support for Allwinner A1x class CPUs, and ARM Cortex A8 class SoC by chineese Allwinner Tech. http://www.github.com/hno/uboot-allwinner/ To be honest I am not guilty to much of the code. The bulk of the A10 support was kindly donated by Allwinner via Tom Cubie, including a SPL support enabling the A10 boot rom to boot u-boot dir4ectly from sd cards. So far for th A10 I have mostly managed to produce failed ports to later u-boot versions where SPL crashes and cleaned things up a little. For the last couple of months I have been staring at A13, the newer little brother of A10, trying to get SPL to work there and now finally I have got the pieces together and we have a working (but not optimal) SPL for A13. Also involved in the free kernel development for Allwinner A1x class SoCs and other supporting tools for the SoC family. Outside u-boot I am the proud father of 6 wonderful kids, president of the Squid Software Foundation, and an independent IT consultant focusing on Linux & networking. Been hacking on computers for more than 3 decades, ranging from demo programming, game development, web interfaces, application level proxies, kernel drivers, and now back to bare metal in u-boot. My work on u-boot is done by interest in both the SoCs in question and bare metal development, and plan to continue looking after this class of SoCs for quite some time. Kind regards Henrik Nordström Sweden ___ U-Boot mailing list U-Boot@lists.denx.de http://lists.denx.de/mailman/listinfo/u-boot
Re: [U-Boot] A little introduction
Hi Henrik, On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 1:24 AM, Henrik Nordström wrote: > A little introduction to let you know who I am and why I am here. Welcome, nice to see you pop up here :) > I am maintaining u-boot support for Allwinner A1x class CPUs, and ARM > Cortex A8 class SoC by chineese Allwinner Tech. > http://www.github.com/hno/uboot-allwinner/ > > To be honest I am not guilty to much of the code. The bulk of the A10 > support was kindly donated by Allwinner via Tom Cubie, including a SPL > support enabling the A10 boot rom to boot u-boot dir4ectly from sd > cards. So far for th A10 I have mostly managed to produce failed ports > to later u-boot versions where SPL crashes and cleaned things up a > little. I must make an apology - I had committed to assisting you and Tom in bringing this port into mainline U-Boot (including investigating the SPL breakage et. al.). Unfortunately, a few personal issues have developed which have forced me to put my U-Boot development (and software development in general) on hiatus. I will, however, still be floating around on the mailing list and will response (maybe a little slowly) to emails directed my way. So I will be able to review any patches that do get posted. I may even pop up now and again on #arm-netbook and #u-boot, but not for a while. > For the last couple of months I have been staring at A13, the newer > little brother of A10, trying to get SPL to work there and now finally I > have got the pieces together and we have a working (but not optimal) SPL > for A13. That's great news. When you say 'little brother', does that imply that the A13 is a lower-powered/featured device when compared against the A10? > Also involved in the free kernel development for Allwinner A1x class > SoCs and other supporting tools for the SoC family. > > Outside u-boot I am the proud father of 6 wonderful kids, president of > the Squid Software Foundation, and an independent IT consultant focusing > on Linux & networking. Wow - I thought I had my hands full. > Been hacking on computers for more than 3 decades, ranging from demo > programming, game development, web interfaces, application level > proxies, kernel drivers, and now back to bare metal in u-boot. > > My work on u-boot is done by interest in both the SoCs in question and > bare metal development, and plan to continue looking after this class of > SoCs for quite some time. Good to hear that there are individuals committed to supporting this hardware. My perception is that we are seeing explosive growth in the 'cheap but feature-full' ARM SoC market. But the consequence of the amount of competition in the market is that vendor margins are dropping and, as a consequence, vendors are devoting very little time to support us. I just wish they would at least produce datasheets that were more than an over-rated product brochure ;) I'm looking forward to seeing what eventuates Regards, Graeme ___ U-Boot mailing list U-Boot@lists.denx.de http://lists.denx.de/mailman/listinfo/u-boot
Re: [U-Boot] A little introduction
ons 2012-09-12 klockan 11:26 +1000 skrev Graeme Russ: > I must make an apology - I had committed to assisting you and Tom in > bringing this port into mainline U-Boot (including investigating the > SPL breakage et. al.). No need to apology. We all have life (to various degrees) outside computers. AW A1X SPL seems to be under control. And currently massaging support for the two CPUs (AW A10 and A13) into a shared (and fully up to date) tree. The two CPUs are mostly the same for u-boot with only some tiny differences in DRAM and clocking. > That's great news. When you say 'little brother', does that imply that > the A13 is a lower-powered/featured device when compared against the > A10? A13 is a very stripped down device compared to A10, aimed solely at dirt cheap 7" tablets where A10 is a general multi-purpose flexible beast. > Good to hear that there are individuals committed to supporting this > hardware. My perception is that we are seeing explosive growth in the > 'cheap but feature-full' ARM SoC market. But the consequence of the > amount of competition in the market is that vendor margins are > dropping and, as a consequence, vendors are devoting very little time > to support us. I just wish they would at least produce datasheets that > were more than an over-rated product brochure ;) There is a restricted circulation AW A10 datasheet which is not the product brochure, but the Linux kernel sources is the authorative source of information in any interesting areas. Regards Henrik ___ U-Boot mailing list U-Boot@lists.denx.de http://lists.denx.de/mailman/listinfo/u-boot
Re: [U-Boot] A little introduction
I just noticed this mail today, sorry for the late reply. Thanks Henrik for introducing this in the u-boot mail list. I am Tom Cubie, a former engineer at Allwinner. Allwinner Tech is a 5-years-old Chinese company making low cost ARM soc. I joined Allwinner last year, and have been working on the Linux BSP, U-boot and some device drivers. To help speed up development and improve resource usage i suggested that we Allwinner should open source and work with the open source community as it is the fastest way for Allwinner engineer to learn and get feedback. At that time the EOMA project announced that they will make computer-on-module using allwinner A10 chip. I have been trying to advocate the benefits of open source within the company since then. The community's work are based on a number of source releases by both Allwinner and their customers. Though there are source code public. i feel that there are not many developers (like Henrik) on Allwinner platform. I think one reason is no good hardware to work on it and also the lack of documents. So my colleagues and i, we made the cubieboard (cubieboard.org), a low cost board based on A10. Hope that we can improve the FOSS on Allwinner platform. Because of family reasons I recently quit my job at Allwinner and decide to run cubieboard project fulltime while still get support from my former colleagues. If there are developers in the mail list interested in hacking the board, welcome. We offer special orders to developers. ___ U-Boot mailing list U-Boot@lists.denx.de http://lists.denx.de/mailman/listinfo/u-boot
