Best Practices for Board Ports

In addition to the regular best practices such as using Checkpatch and following the Documentation Style and the U-Boot Coding Style there are some things which are specific to creating a new board port.

• Implement U-Boot Standard Boot to ensure that most operating systems will be supported by the platform.

• The platform defconfig file must be generated via make savedefconfig.

• The Kconfig and Kbuild infrastructure supports using “fragments” that can be used to apply changes on top of a defconfig file. These can be useful for many things such as:

  • Supporting different firmware locations (e.g. eMMC, SD, QSPI).

  • Multiple board variants when runtime detection is not desired.

  • Supporting different build types such as production and development.

  Kconfig fragments should reside in the board directory itself rather than in the top-level configs/ directory.