[Sound-open-firmware] System Controller Unit firmware code inside SOF

[Pierre-Louis Bossart]

On 9/3/19 9:28 AM, Daniel Baluta wrote:
> Hi Liam / Pierre,
> 
> I want to hear your take on the following.
> 
> On some of our i.MX platforms most of the critical functions
> like PM, clocks, interrupts are handled by a special core name
> SCU (System Controller Unit).
> 
> It runs a special firmware (SCFW). In order for our DSP core to
> communicate with SCU it needs to use a special interface exported
> by the SCFW.
> 
> The interface is BSD-3 Clause licensed. Anyhow, as you might expect
> the coding style / file naming / organization is firmware like. That means
> very very different from what we have in SOF.
> 
> Do you think such an interface would be acceptable to be merged in SOF?
> Or should we spent some time to rewrite it from scratch to match the quality
> of the existing SOF code?
> 
> The bad part in rewriting it from scratch is that we need to update-it by hand
> each time the SCFW interface changes.

Just to be clear, you are talking about a header file as well as the 
library implementing the interface to the SCU?

In the latter case, do we need to import it in the SOF project, which 
means periodic PRs to update it, or could you just link against it?

FWIW, Intel has two cases where we'd like to add the header files in the 
SOF project so that the integration is not an issue. However the 
libraries will not be part of the SOF tree, maybe something similar 
could apply here. we want it to make it easier to use additional 
libraries, but whether the code for those libraries belongs in SOF 
should be a case-by-case discussion.

My 2 cents.

-Pierre