Re: [PATCH 00/17] arm: semihosting: Cleanups and new features

From: Sean Anderson <sean.anderson@seco.com>
To: Tom Rini <trini@konsulko.com>
Cc: Andre Przywara <andre.przywara@arm.com>,
	Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org>,
	Simon Glass <sjg@chromium.org>,
	u-boot@lists.denx.de, Mingkai Hu <mingkai.hu@nxp.com>,
	Priyanka Jain <priyanka.jain@nxp.com>,
	Rajesh Bhagat <rajesh.bhagat@nxp.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/17] arm: semihosting: Cleanups and new features
Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2022 11:48:50 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <95c128ae-652a-0e00-695b-47b6a2d150df@seco.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20220304184637.GZ5020@bill-the-cat>

Hi Tom/Andre,

On 3/4/22 1:46 PM, Tom Rini wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 04, 2022 at 12:19:27PM -0500, Sean Anderson wrote:
>> Hi Andre,
>> 
>> On 3/4/22 6:47 AM, Andre Przywara wrote:
>> > On Fri, 4 Mar 2022 02:06:03 +0100
>> > Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org> wrote:
>> > 
>> > Hi,
>> > 
>> > Linus, thanks for the heads up, much appreciated!
>> > 
>> >> On Thu, Mar 3, 2022 at 9:44 PM Sean Anderson <sean.anderson@seco.com> wrote:
>> >> 
>> >> > The main device affected by these changes is vexpress64, so I'd appreciate
>> >> > if Linus (or anyone else) could try booting.  
>> > 
>> > As it happens, I am sitting on a series updating vexpress_aemv8a_semi, and
>> > letting it use OF_CONTROL. I will send this ASAP.
>> > As it turned out, the automatic semihosting boot command is actually broken
>> > in v2022.01, the fix is the first patch in my series. This clashes with
>> > this series, but it's easy to resolve.
>> 
>> I, for one, appreciate that the boot command is no longer all one line after
>> your series.
>> 
>> Simon/Tom, which series would you like to be based off the other?
> 
> I think it's however it's easiest for you two to collaborate.

I think it will be cleaner for me to base my series on his, but I just want to
avoid having to rebase a lot :)

>> > From skimming over this series here, it looks quite nice, I especially love
>> > promoting the semihosting load to a proper filesystem. The only drawback
>> > seems to be that this will break existing scripts used by people in their
>> > deployments, which rely on the smhload command. I don't really know if
>> > there are actually any users doing so, but I guess we will find out.
>> 
>> Yeah, I'm not sure what the stance on shell compatibility is. As I understand
>> it, for the C API only in-tree users matter. However, shell commands are more
>> of an "external" API, used by distro boot scripts. Simon/Tom, what's the
>> process for this?
> 
> Well, in this case we can be a bit more cavalier than typical because of
> the very limited user base.  So long as we have good documentation
> around it including something around how to transition to the new
> commands, it should be fine to do so, when the code is otherwise ready.

OK, I will add some more documentation about transitioning to this series.

--Sean