getting allwinner SoC support upstream (was Re: Uploading linux (3.9.4-1))

[tomasz.figa@gmail.com (Tomasz Figa)]

On Wednesday 05 of June 2013 22:16:37 Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 05, 2013 at 03:00:13PM -0600, Stephen Warren wrote:
> > 2) Having U-Boot itself read a DT and configure itself, just like the
> > kernel does. This is relatively new, and only supported by a few
> > boards
> > (all Tegra to some extent, and a couple each Samsung Exynos and Xilinx
> > boards). I suspect/guess this is the kind of thing that Luke was
> > referring to re: U-Boot fex integration.
> 
> Reading what I have of this thread, this is just another case of
> $company runs of and does their own unique way of doing something,
> which is in a totally different direction from that path chosen by
> Linux kernel developers, and Linux kernel developers are _expected_
> to roll over and accept $company's unique way of doing it.
> 
> $company could have assisted with the DT effort, helping to sort out
> the common arch issues (which haven't been all that much), converting
> drivers to DT and such like.  But no, instead they've gone off and
> created their own thing.
> 
> I wonder how many more of these cases there needs to be before people
> get the message that Linux kernel developers *do* *not* like this
> behaviour, and if you do this, then chances are you're going to be
> stuck with having code which isn't able to be merged into mainline.
> 
> And I don't buy the argument that we were still sorting out DT.  DT has
> been well defined for many many years before we started using it on ARM.
> It has been used for years on both PowerPC and Sparc architectures to
> describe their hardware, and all of the DT infrastructure was already
> present in the kernel.  What was left for us were:
> 
> * converting our platform-data based drivers to use data from DT.
> * come up with ways of dealing with SoC issues such as clock
>   representation, pin muxing and such like in DT.
> 
> But no... all that had to be created in this custom fex stuff which now
> presents a barrier with getting support for something merged.
> 
> And somehow people make out that this is _our_ problem...

Well said. And the problem is that this is not the first and probably not 
the last such case.

Best regards,
Tomasz