[meta-freescale] Draft of FSL Community notes to help QorIQ developers...

[Bob Cochran]

Hello FSL Community,

I offer the text below for inclusion in the Community documentation to 
help QorIQ developers get started and clear up potential confusion 
between the two FSL platforms (i.MX vs QorIQ) and also the community vs. 
SDK issue.

It would be nice to have a highlighted note on the community home page 
stating that "QorIQ is now part of the FSL Community - read more here... 
<link>.  Of course, please add wherever you see fit and modify / add as 
you like (I didn't include any marketing fluff).

I didn't want to duplicate what Zhenhua had already written, so I 
reference his schedule instead.  If the text below proves to be too 
sparse, I'll be glad to add more.  Also, I'll certainly be more than 
willing to update the text over time as the support of QorIQ progresses 
and some of my own confusion is resolved.


********** doc starts here **********

As of July 2014, QorIQ devices are supported as part of the Freescale 
Community BSP project.  However, QorIQ developers should be aware that 
the support process is in a transitory stage and various aspects of the 
process will be coming online throughout the remainder of the year.

The Yocto Project meta-freescale mailing list is very likely the most up 
to date source of information regarding which aspects of the community 
support process are in effect for QorIQ.  A recent update to Freescale's 
schedule for QorIQ community support can be read here: 
https://www.mail-archive.com/meta-freescale@yoctoproject.org/msg09249.html

Some of the most obvious immediate benefits of the inclusion of QorIQ in 
the community project include the ability to discuss QorIQ issues with 
other developers, build images for both i.MX and QorIQ using a common 
build system & meta data, and be part of developing and improving the 
code base for Freescale QorIQ processors built using the Yocto Project 
Linux ecosystem.

The community QorIQ software is in addition & complementary to the QorIQ 
Linux SDK releases that are found on the Freescale web site.  Currently, 
the SDK release is more comprehensive and contains an additional layer 
(meta-fsl-networking) with recipes that pull source provided exclusively 
in the SDK ISO image.  In other words, the  SCM repositories for the 
meta-fsl-networking recipes are not stored on a public site and are not 
currently part of the Community project.  For these recipes, the 
software license is typically more restrictive per Freescale's terms.

QorIQ developers should also be aware that each SDK release undergoes 
testing by Freescale developers with each supported Freescale QorIQ 
development platform (e.g., P1010RDB).  However, the community BSP 
images are not currently being tested extensively by Freescale.  
Therefore, a QorIQ community developer may be the first one to test a 
particular QorIQ development system with a community built image.

Note that both the Yocto Project 1.7 release and Freescale SDK 1.7 
release are in development; the SDK release is planned to trail the 
Yocto release, and a Community 1.7 release will trail the SDK 1.7 
release (for more details, see the aforementioned Freescale schedule).

Historically, the QorIQ family has been based on Power Architecture 
(powerpc), and the meta data for these Power-based SoCs can be found in 
the community's meta-fsl-ppc layer.  QorIQ Layerscape (LS) ARM support 
will soon be added to the community's meta-fsl-arm layer, and files 
specific to QorIQ ARM will be denoted with an "ls" prefix.

Developers should also be aware that the QorIQ layer recipes pull source 
from Freescale's Public GIT site: http://git.freescale.com. It is 
anticipated that both a public mailing list and bug reporting system 
will be introduced this year by Freescale to support the activity 
associated with these repositories.

All community image recipes, regardless of architecture, may make use of 
the common base, poky, meta-fsl-demos, and meta-openembedded community 
layers.  Currently, the Freescale supplied demo image recipes targeting 
QorIQ processors have a "-networking" suffix (e.g., 
fsl-image-networking.bb).