[Sound-open-firmware] Initial support for i.MX8 platform

[Daniel Baluta]

On Mon, May 20, 2019 at 9:16 PM Pierre-Louis Bossart
<pierre-louis.bossart at linux.intel.com> wrote:
>
> On 5/20/19 9:26 AM, Daniel Baluta wrote:
> > Hi Liam / Pierre,
> >
> > I've sent initial patches for i.MX8 FW [1]. There are still a lot
> > of things to be done but I will to solve them step by step.
>
> Thanks, this is great news!
>
> > Appreciate any review and hope to get at least the basic support
> > accepted then build on top of that.
> >
> > Next steps:
> >
> > 1) Add CI support to compile for imx architecture (both FW/Linux)
>
> Maybe a clarification here.
>
> For each PR, we also want to have quick feedback if compilation and
> QEMU-based tests fail, but we can't do hardware-based tests for every PR
> on all platforms.
>
> In addition, for hardware tests, we don't have a centralized CI -
> similar to the majority of the open-source programs. The expectation is
> that every contributor company takes care in depth of their own
> platforms, using GitHub triggers to run the tests as needed. Intel folks
> are not going to run any tests on i.MX hardware nor would we expect
> anyone to run tests for each PR on Intel hardware, though it'd be nice
> to know if the tests fail with the results visible.
>
> So short answer, we can add some compilation checks for i.MX8 on both
> Travis CI and the Intel-hosted one, but don't expect more.
>
> Was this your understanding?

This is my understanding too. We need to add compilation check for i.MX the
rest we will try to handle it internally.

>
> > 2) Send Linux kernel side patches.
>
> For the Linux part, we try to build from a minimal kernel, see the
> kconfig subproject on SOF. If we can have a similar solution for i.MX
> it'd be great. Maintaining entire configs is too complicated, using a
> default + SOF-required additions is a lot simpler.

default + SOF required additions is good ans simple. The one problem
is that arm64 use one single config for all supported boards, hence the
compilation takes sometimes more than we want.

For me this is not a problem because I don't build from fresh code very often
but for CI indeed I need to find a way to have a smaller config.

thanks,
Daniel.