PinePhone development questions (Or: U-Boot PinePhone 3GB support)

[jbit]

Hi,

I'm digging a bit into the nuts and bolts of the PinePhone, and would like to have a ground up OS built working for when my 3GB PMOS edition arrives. I noticed on IRC that there are known issues with OS support and the 3GB PinePhone, so I thought I'd dig into what's going on, here's what I've found so far, but please correct me if I'm wrong 

• The root cause is that upstream u-boot doesn't support dual-rank dram on the R40/A64 SoCs, so it panics.
  
• There was a patch submitted upstream to the u-boot project, but never got merged (because it's RFC, I imagine): https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2...16856.html
  
• PMOS uses source from Pine64/u-boot, and then applies a local copy of the dualrank patch. (According to this APKBUILD)
  
• JumpDrive uses source from upstream u-boot, and then applies a couple of local patches (including the dualrank patch). (According to this Makefile)
  
• Crust uses source from Pine64/u-boot, and then applies a local copy of the dualrank patch. (According to the gitlab config)
  

It feels a bit chaotic.

So I have a few questions:

• What's holding up the patch getting into u-boot upstream?
  
• Is upstream patch progress tracked anywhere?
  
• Is there anything stopping the patch being committed to the Pine64/u-boot repo? (Which would allow projects to simply point at that commit to get support)
  
• Is there anywhere where cross-OS efforts like u-boot fixes/kernel fixes/etc are being tracked and coordinated?
  

Sorry if these are super noob questions

Cheers

jbit