Openmoko kernel situation

[Nelson Castillo]

On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 5:04 AM, Rask Ingemann Lambertsen
<rask at sygehus.dk> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 03, 2009 at 05:29:21PM -0700, Nelson Castillo wrote:
>> > According to my sources, Openmoko will continue to support kernel
>> > maintenance and contribution to upstream. Nelson will be in charge of
>> > this.
>>
>> "In charge" means that now I will be doing time-consuming things (such
>> as help preparing patches for upstream). Now we will need more help
>> from the community for patch review. I will also apply community
>> patches and get the blame if things break.
>
>   What about U-Boot? For example, I posted a patch to make U-Boot able to
> load kernels from above 4 GB on SDHC cards:
>
> https://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/openmoko-kernel/2009-March/009573.html
>
>   I will, time permitting, post more patches for things like
>
>  - automatic kernel size detection for NAND flash.
>  - reiserfs support (just needs to be enabled, AFAIK).
>  - reducing the time you need to hold POWER to get to the menu.
>
>   Also, recent test results
> https://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/community/2009-March/044553.html
> suggest that it is probably possible to bring up the boot menu with reduced
> backlight even when only 100 mA is available.

This sounds very good.

Could you help us decide what goes into u-boot? My heuristic for this
proposal: It's much better if you decide it than if I do it :-)

Let's not worry about the repository/permissions now. I could just
apply the patches you (and perhaps someone else) say are OK and if the
volume of patches somehow grows we can use GIT as a DCVS or something
to make things easier. Later we would find a way to create the
snapshots or we can link to the snapshots compiled and tested by
someone.

Any cons?

Werner, what do you think about the U-boot patches and about the idea
in this email?