Hi --
--- In Eddie Dawydiuk <> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> > What I will side on you
> > though, TS might have wanted to do a little more legwork on the RT
side of
> > things before declaring things "great and prosperous"[1].
>
> What RT features would you like to see Technologic System back port to
> 2.6.21? Are there any bugs/problems you know of that would imply the
> page you referenced is misleading or incorrect?[1]
Well, since you asked :)
* Enable HRT by default. For your ep93xx boards, this should be just
a matter of selecting it when make menuconfig. For your orion
board(s), there would be some back-porting, but AFAIK the code is all
there in later kernels. Orion support in mainline didn't come until
after 2.6.21.
* Enable low latency option (CONFIG_PREEMPT). Same as above. These
two, HRT & PREEMPT, would give most users features they want from an
RT system, without resorting to the complexities of other, hard-RT
approaches. They are in the vanilla kernel.
* Make it possible access to use your binary SD module in a vanilla
kernel build.
>
> As we all know Linux is under constant development, new features are
> constantly being added. It would be great if Technologic Systems would
> back port every new feature in Linux. But unfortunately the
> managers/business people tell us it's not economical to do this.
Well, it's a two-way street: if you (or the community) does the
up-front work to get your board support into the vanilla kernel, then
these new features come automatically as they are added later!
Although it is work to get your code accepted (as Alex can attest), it
is usually for good reason. Later, if a developer adds a feature to
the kernel, breaking an internal ABI, then he is responsible for
fixing what he breaks in the process, so there is much more on-going
community maintenance for mainline code.
> Although the great thing about open source is you don't have to rely on
> a vendor to solve all of your problems. You can back port these new
> features yourself. You can then share them with the community and
> everyone can benefit. It would be great if a vendor could be all things
> to all people, but thats just not possible.
>
> It's great that people like yourself are interested in getting the
> TS-7800 mainline, I think it's a very noble effort. Please keep in mind
> Technologic Systems is here to support you as well as all of its
> customers if you/they have any problems or questions. Please let us
know
> if you find any bugs or strange behavior, we are more than happy to fix
> them.
>
> > Also if they fixed
> > that damn trivial bug in TS-BOOTROM to pass the real platform ID
would have
> > been nice without the world having to resort to ugly hacks[2] :-/
>
> What is the failure condition? Is the problem that Linux 2.6.x doesn't
> like the way Technologic Systems code base handles machine IDs and
> wouldn't except it mainline?
This bug has been around forever, starting in redboot on ts-7200, and
Jesse was going to look into fixing it [1]. The failure is that
TS-7XXX boards are purported to work with vanilla kernels, but if a
naive user builds an unpatched kernel, or does not modify the binary
image, he gets a puzzling failure to boot. It's all about playing
nice with others, and making your product easy to use for people who
choose to use SW other than your default build.
>
> Please keep in mind one of our primary concerns as an industrial SBC
> vendor is reliability. Technologic Systems doesn't typically make
> changes to there design unless there is a good reason to do so.
I agree completely. However, by locking into a kernel version
prematurely, (ie, orion boards before orion support was in main-line
kernel), the diff between your kernel and vanilla is much bigger than
necessary, and can hinder people who want to add new HW support
(crypto engine, etc). That gulf will only get bigger in the future,
as I'm sure you will want to make minimal kernel changes when you
introduce your next orion board.
Hope this doesn't come off too critical. You asked :), and that's a
good thing!
Regards, ........ Charlie
http://www.freelists.org/archives/linux-cirrus/12-2006/msg00041.html
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