What's the difference between targets bcm63xx and bmips?

For Developers
#1

Hi all.

While looking through the source, I realised there was a target named bmips and another target named bcm63xx. I would've presumed from the target descriptions that bcm63xx was only for those chips, with a DSL core, and bmips covered all others (namely, bcm33xx with DOCSIS modem).

Then I realised the bcm3368 is under the bcm63xx target? What's the deal with that? And there's also some DTS files duplicated under both targets?

#2

bmips includes all SoCs with bmips processors, therefore bcm63xx can be included into it

bmips should replace bcm63xx in the future. This could also happen with bcm47xx if someone ports the target.

2 Likes
#3

In addition to the above:

bmips: add new target

This target has full device tree support, thus reducing the number of
patches needed for bcm63xx, in which there's a patch for every board.

(from https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/openwrt.git;a=commit;h=029093a302c9a66b74bec46285a179abd122a40a)

#4

Thank you for the response. I should probably have checked git before posting.

Am I also correct in presuming that bcm63xx (and bcm47xx) will be deprecated sooner rather than later, and therefore any new devices should be added under the new bmips target instead?

#5

The bmips is not presented in the release repo:
https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/22.03.0-rc5/targets/

Any reasons?

#6

bmips is intentionally marked as source-only for the time being, which prevents it from being built by the buildhosts.

#7

I'm trying to port OpenWRT to an unsupported device, should I target bcm63xx or bmips? I can see that the bcm63xx does not support external mdio mux, which is needed.

How can I find out if something (in the documentation, if any) in the BMIPS works? E.g. PCIe, MDIO?