[meta-xilinx] linux-xlnx kernel recipe changes

[Nathan Rossi]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Philip Balister [mailto:philip at balister.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, 10 March 2015 4:27 AM
> To: Nathan Rossi; meta-xilinx at lists.yoctoproject.org
> Subject: Re: [meta-xilinx] linux-xlnx kernel recipe changes
> 
> 
> 
> On 03/09/2015 02:25 AM, Nathan Rossi wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > There are some changes that I would like to get feedback on regarding
> the kernel recipes in meta-xilinx.
> >
> > First off, the smaller changes.
> >
> > 1. MicroBlaze defaulting to linux-yocto kernel. The mainline and linux-
> yocto kernels are quite stable regarding MicroBlaze and little has changed
> (and linux-xlnx kernel provides little in addition to mainline for
> MicroBlaze).
> > 2. Drop linux-xlnx 3.10, this kernel is really old and maintaining it
> has become a bit problematic.
> >
> > So the bigger change is quite different to how the current linux-xlnx
> recipes work. The idea is to only provide a single linux-xlnx kernel via
> an autorev kernel recipe based on the 'master' branch (sort of like linux-
> xlnx-dev). There are a number of reasons why this approach can work
> better, and there are a number of reasons why it might be less useful than
> the existing approach. The primary reason why I would like to move to this
> approach is to better support and maintain a functional linux-xlnx kernel
> as the Xilinx kernel is maintained on the 'master' branch, including
> features and bug fixes. Given there can be a number of different versions
> of the linux-xlnx kernel that users would like to target for their
> projects, it is still possible for a user to include the linux-xlnx.inc
> and pin the specific version they are after. However I would really like
> to get some input from those who are relying/using the linux-xlnx recipes.
> >
> 
> AUTOREV is evil. It means you need to be very, very careful how you rev
> the repo it points at, and it means users may changes that break
> something and this will confuse them.
> 
> We use the 3.14 recipe with a bbappend to support a product.
> 
> That said, I'd love to see a working recipe based on the a released
> Linux kernel.

What would your opinion of a most current linux-xlnx release recipe be? This would be a recipe that is setup for the 'xilinx-v2014.4' tag of the linux-xlnx kernel. And the recipe would be manually rev'd up upon a new xilinx-v20*.* release tags. However there would only be one release at a time.

> 
> 
> 
> > There is also the goal to switch Zynq (and ZynqMP in the future) to use
> linux-yocto by default. However there are still a few drivers that are not
> upstream that make the linux-yocto kernel a bit limited for the common use
> cases. I would like to get some feedback on this also to see what everyone
> is relying on from linux-xlnx to see if some priorities can be made to
> have this sooner. The list I have at the moment is the following:
> >
> >  * macb performance and features (e.g. rgmii2gmii)
> >  * QSPI
> >  * devcfg
> 
> Without devcfg, how is the fpga loaded? We depend on loading the fpga
> from the user space application.
> 
> Pihlip
> 
> 
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Nathan
> >