On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 12:49 AM, Derek LaHousse dlahouss@mtu.edu wrote:
On Sat, 2014-05-24 at 11:36 +0200, Miguel Garcia wrote:
2014-05-23 22:57 GMT+02:00 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net:
so i am inclined, especially because i anticipate USB3 SoCs coming along over the next 8-9 years, to replace SATA with USB2 and 2 other lines. i think, joe, that one of them should be the "TTL high Power Line" for the voltage levels on GPIO (and UART).
I think it's a good idea.
EOMA-68 should be compatible with most SoCs. If SATA prevents EOMA is compatible with most SoCs, I think it is better to delete SATA.
If all you want is to make a product that works for tablets, go ahead. But SATA is a disk standard, while USB is a peripheral bus. As I understand it (and I could be wrong, please educate me), the USB bus generally has to go through CPU,
the standard mentor usb hard macros have associated source code which is DMA driven.
allwinner licensed mentor's usb hard macros, and cheerfully completely ignored mentor's source code on which the linux kernel driver for many years has been based, writing their own usb driver which places some considerable load on the CPU.
it has yet to be seen whether they have the good sense to get with the program when they start doing USB3.
So, if I can echo some of what Luke has said previously, this is for tablet AND tv AND laptop AND mini-computer. Please please please do NOT cut out the SATA connector.
we have a choice derek: don't have a successful standard because the number of available SoCs are too far apart, or have a successful standard that has many SoCs per year to choose from over the next decade.
that isn't much of a choice, so, logically, we go with the success option.
l.