[meta-freescale] The Yocto layer re-architect for FSL QorIQ SDK

[Otavio Salvador]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 11:32 AM, Richard Schmitt
<richard.schmitt at freescale.com> wrote:
>>> Freescale will break every product layer out there for no good reason, it seems. The
>>> previous repository cannot be removed without critical impacts.
>
> I don't see that.  Currently meta-fsl-ppc is only used by customers building for QorIQ based boards.  So essentially we are renaming meta-fsl-ppc to be meta-fsl-qoriq.
>
> Then as we add our ARM support for LS1 and LS2, they will be BSPs under meta-fsl-qoriq.

Yes and I have several customers using meta-fsl-ppc layer in their
projects. So it is unacceptable to drop meta-fsl-ppc from the Yocto
Project Git server. There are other ways to do it, if it is really
necessary, more about it later...

>>> FSL processors are the ONLY one in the World to provide DPAA?
>
> Yes, they are.  and logically it is possible for both our ARM and PPC products to support it.  It is why we want a meta-fsl-qoriq layer, so that we could put things like meta-fsl-dpaa in it.
>
> We are trying to model the intel support.  There is a meta-intel layer with individual bsps and a common layer underneath it.
>
> This seems to be the best approach to handle a collection of related products out there.

The Intel layer is not what I'd use as reference. If you see its
popularity it is quite suboptimal and they are doing a very horrible
job in the Intel Galileo and Intel Edison support. To be sincere I
think we are doing an amazingly better job in our community and been
succeed in getting more and more people interested in Freescale
products here.

I do think we may need to rework QorlQ structure but the proposed way
might impose fragmentation instead of providing a turn-key solution
for QorlQ users. In fact, most of platform users does not care if it
is a PPC or ARM core but if does fulfill their needs or not. The same
applies for Yocto Project tools.

I have a different view how to organize the layer basically merging
the QorlQ machines in a single layer but without Core CPU split; this
easies the visualization of layer and reusability a lot. I can help on
this if you like this approach.

>>> I think it is too soon to talk about any reorganization of the
>>> layers. I am still awaiting for the layers cleanup on the
>>> meta-fsl-ppc as several recipes there belong to other layers (meta-networking, meta-oe and so on).
>
> That doesn't make sense to me.  The idea is to cleanup the layers as part of the restructuring.  Why would we want to do it as separate steps.

Sorry but several recipes included in meta-fsl-ppc currently does not
belong there. There are network utilities, and etc. which  should be
moved out from it and submitted to meta-oe/meta-networking layer.

>>> I have customers moving from/to TI and FSL, those use meta-ti and fsl-arm in SAME
>>> setup with no issues. It is as easy as change the machine name.
>
> That may be fine for generic arm boards, but our BSPs will be extending the generic architectures.

Ideally yes, but this is not what happens nowadays. The metadata
provided by meta-fsl-ppc does not behave properly when used with other
layers. There has some progress on it as Luo and Ting has did some
work on this area, but we are still far from complete.

Richard, don't get me wrong, I understand what you're trying to
archive here and I agree with your goal. However we seem to disagree
on the steps to get there and I think the current proposed approach is
not the in a technical perspective.

I think it is impossible to accomplish this for 1.7 but I am willing
to help if you, and your team, are open to it. We need to discuss the
steps and get people actually doing them so we move to the right
direction.

Best Regards,

-- 
Otavio Salvador                             O.S. Systems
http://www.ossystems.com.br        http://code.ossystems.com.br
Mobile: +55 (53) 9981-7854            Mobile: +1 (347) 903-9750