On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 12:40 AM, Maxime Ripard <maxime.ripard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> As a guide, I've been using other ARM SoCs for examples and a number of
> very useful presentations on ARM SoC support from the Free Electron folks.
> Although presentations such as the "ARM SoC Linux Support Check-list" are
> very useful, they don't go into much detail.
>
> My question is two fold. Is there detailed information of all the things
> that need to be covered in the code to introduce a new ARM SoC into the
> kernel?
Usually "enough so that it boots", which means: timers, interrupts,
UARTs, and that's pretty much it.
Any additional feature is of course welcome, but I'd suggest to just
post that for the first set of patches. There will probably
significant changes to make to your base drivers (and I would include
clocks and pinctrl into these drivers), and these will impact any
further developments. You don't want to have too much dependency :)
Start small, then build on top of what's accepted.
OK, that is pretty much from what I expected. I'll begin this process soon as I have added similar base support for the N32926 which is a bigger brother to the N32905. I figure it's best to lay the foundation for multiple chips in the Nuvoton N329 family from the start.
I've been using the iMX23 and iMX26 SoC support as the model for code placement, naming and such. These chips are useful in the way they share drivers similar to what I would like to do. Are these SoCs known to be following current best ARM SoC practices for me to follow in their path?
Concerning how I should arrange my code in a git repository, currently everything is in a single branch. I guess I'll want to peel out just the minimal set of drivers from which I'll submit patches and then do the work on the more advanced SoC drivers in another set of branches so everything isn't all mixed together.
> Then, is there a description of how I start to go about contributing
> support for this chip into the Linux kernel? I honestly don't really
> know where to begin.
Like I said, send the minimum amount of patches to have Linux boot an
initramfs on your SoC. Apart from that, there is nothing out of the
ordinary on how to submit patches, everything is detailed in
Documentation/SubmittingPatches. Basically, it will involve sending
patches to the linux-arm-kernel mailing list and the ARM SoC kernel
maintainers. Make sure that everything has no warning in
scripts/checkpatch.pl, and you're good to go.
Maxime
Got it. Hopefully I'll start with the first set of patches within in the next few weeks and cross my fingers I'm not chased away with a stick for being such a newbie :-).
Before submitting the first set of patches, would it be useful for me to post a link to them here on this mailing list so someone could look them over as a sanity check before a submission to the linux-arm-kernel mailing list? I'm a bit nervous about making a good first impression.
Mike
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