Re: [PATCH 00/18] hw/riscv: Add Microchip PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit board support

[Alistair Francis]

On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 11:12 AM via <qemu-devel@nongnu.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Anup,
>
> On 8/17/20 11:30 AM, Bin Meng wrote:
> > EXTERNAL EMAIL: Do not click links or open attachments unless you know the 
> > content is safe
> >
> > Hi Anup,
> >
> > On Sat, Aug 15, 2020 at 1:44 AM Anup Patel <anup@brainfault.org> wrote:
> >> On Fri, Aug 14, 2020 at 10:12 PM Bin Meng <bmeng.cn@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> From: Bin Meng <bin.meng@windriver.com>
> >>>
> >>> This adds support for Microchip PolarFire SoC Icicle Kit board.
> >>> The Icicle Kit board integrates a PolarFire SoC, with one SiFive's
> >>> E51 plus four U54 cores and many on-chip peripherals and an FPGA.
> >> Nice Work !!! This is very helpful.
> > Thanks!
> >
> >> The Microchip HSS is quite convoluted. It has:
> >> 1. DDR Init
> >> 2. Boot device support
> >> 3. SBI support using OpenSBI as library
> >> 4. Simple TEE support
> >>
> >> I think point 1) and 2) above should be part of U-Boot SPL.
> >> The point 3) can be OpenSBI FW_DYNAMIC.
> >>
> >> Lastly,for point 4), we are working on a new OpenSBI feature using
> >> which we can run independent Secure OS and Non-Secure OS using
> >> U-Boot_SPL+OpenSBI (for both SiFive Unleashed and Microchip
> >> PolarFire).
> >>
> >> Do you have plans for adding U-Boot SPL support for this board ??
> > + Cyril Jean from Microchip
> >
> > I will have to leave this question to Cyril to comment.
> >
> I currently do not have a plan to support U-Boot SPL. The idea of the
> HSS is to contain all the silicon specific initialization and
> configuration code within the HSS before jumping to U-Boot S-mode. I
> would rather keep all this within the HSS for the time being. I would
> wait until we reach production silicon before attempting to move this to
> U-Boot SPL as the HSS is likely to contain some opaque silicon related
> changes for another while.

That is unfortunate, a lot of work has gone into making the boot flow
simple and easy to use.

QEMU now includes OpenSBI by default to make it easy for users to boot
Linux. The Icicle Kit board is now the most difficult QEMU board to
boot Linux on. Not to mention it makes it hard to impossible to
support it in standard tool flows such as meta-riscv.

Alistair

>
>
> Regards,
>
> Cyril.
>