[Milkymist-devel] Pushing support in the official Linux kernel

[Florian Fainelli]

Hi Sebastien,

Some more hints below:

Le mercredi 2 septembre 2009 20:43:55, Sébastien Bourdeauducq a écrit :
> Hi,
>
> For pushing Milkymist support into the mainline Linux kernel, it seems that
> all we need to do is (thanks for the precisions Florian):
> - polish edges on our current version
> - fork Linus Torvald's repository. To make things easy, it's available at
> http://github.com/github/linux-2.6/tree/master
> - add our Mico32 noMMU target. Our current code should be fairly compatible
> with the mainline Linux kernel, since uClinux is basically a collection of
> additional noMMU targets that are not integrated in the mainline kernel
> yet. So we essentially need to copy the arch/lm32 folder and integrate our
> custom drivers (for serial, flash, etc.)

Once that is done, do a lot of testing on real hardware to ensure you have a 
working kernel port, forward porting changes from 2.6.23 to 2.6.32* can result 
in a lot of time spent debugging memory management on no-MMU systems ;)

> - use as many existing code in include/asm-generic as possible, to reduce
> code duplication
> - run scripts/checkpatch.pl and fix found problems
> - check everything is still 100% OK on hardware
> - talk to the kernel.org people

Since there is already a git repository for Milkymist, what you can do, is 
prepare a "for-linus" branch which has the LM32 support splitted in patches 
ready to be merged into mainline kernel, I cannot point to a specific way of 
splitting patches, but see how Microblaze did it [1]. Once that is done, 
generate the patches and post them on linux-arch as well as linux-kernel.

I would also recommend getting in touch with people who wrote the initial 
Linux kernel port, they might want to become the official maintainers of this 
architecture even though they do not do the initial inclusion.

[1] : http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/7/8/145
-- 
Cordialement, Florian Fainelli
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