[RPI BSP] cleaned up and reqest for review

[Pavel Pisa]

Hello Joel and Qiao Yang,

On Monday 15 of June 2015 15:39:15 Joel Sherrill wrote:
> On 6/14/2015 5:31 AM, QIAO YANG wrote:
> > 1. Will rpi bsp has any kernel command line setup like i386? This would
> > let us to choose fb console port or serial console port . Or maybe we
> > just use compiler macro to enable/disable graphic console output?
>
> How does the Linux kernel get its boot arguments? The pc386 BSP gets its
> arguments the same way. Then there are some bsp command line methods to
> access the parameters. The start code passes a string pointer to boot_card
> for this to happen.

Linux kernel on ARM can use two mechanism to obtain command line
options from boot-loader

The first is ATAGs mechanisms. This mechanism generally provides
machine specific code to the kernel and sequence of 32-bit
size and tag/data type blocks. ATAGS structure usually starts
at memory address 0x100.

The second, preferred now method, is to copy to RAM or prepare
flattened device tree data (FDT) structure to the RAM from bootloader.
This mechanism allows to describe all (allmost) machine parameters
and peripherals connection to different non-enumerated busses.
(Runtime detection is used for devices connected to enumerated busses).

Older Videocore boot firmware did not provide FDT method nor
merging but actual version is able to prepare device tree data
in memory, merge commandline and optional specified device
tree fragments and start kernel

The short overview is placed on slide 13 and 14 of my presentation

http://installfest.cz/if15/slides/pisa_rpi.pdf

Complete Videocore firmware options are described there

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/config-txt.md

Description of Linux kernel booting on ARM is described
in Linux kernel sources documentation

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/arm/Booting

The mainline U-boot switched to FDT based method long time ago
and RPi branch provides FDT support now as well. I have build
such U-boot and use FDT configured kernel on RPi with U-boot
and direct boot from firmware for some time already.

It would be great to provide some basic device tree support
to RTEMS because it would solve parameters parsing and
device recognition/base addresses etc. on all U-boot supported
ARM platforms in future. Searching for nodes in device
tree binary structure is quite easy. Knowledge how to interpret
the names and hierarchy can be sometimes more complex but
it is described in Linux kernel sources.

Pointers to many FDT documents can be found there

http://elinux.org/Device_Tree

and I would help with testing, ideas and may it be with some
code if time allows.

But it is probably task for separate GSoC or major project.

> > Something waiting to be done:
> > 1. graphic console need the keyboard implementation . I would like to
> > know the status of keyboard implementation.

Most common is USB keyboard on RPi so it depends on USB support project.
But for graphic output is is not so critical and for real embedded
systems small keyboard on SPI can be usable as well.

SPI on RPi is not/should not be a problem. I can provide examples
of SPI based keyboard support for RTEMS and even HW implementation
used on our other systems.

Best wishes,

            Pavel Pisa