Re: breaking DT compatibility (was: Re: [PATCH v4] clk: sunxi: Refactor A31 PLL6 so that it can be reused)

[Maxime Ripard <maxime.ripard@free-electrons.com>]

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On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 04:30:01PM +0000, Mark Rutland wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 03:37:55PM +0100, Maxime Ripard wrote:
> > Hi Rob,
> > 
> > On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 07:42:02AM -0600, Rob Herring wrote:
> > > On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 6:30 AM, Andre Przywara <andre.przywara@arm.com> wrote:
> > > > Hi,
> > > >
> > > > just a ping:
> > > >
> > > > Are we really OK with breaking existing DTs in 4.6? (per the code in
> > > > -next: f7d372ba54ea04d528a291b8dbe34716507bb60b, which is this patch).
> > > 
> > > I only warn and make sure people are aware of the issue. I leave that
> > > up to platform maintainers to decide. It depends on the maturity of
> > > the platform and users.
> > 
> > The impacted SoCs support is really partial. For the most supported
> > one, big things like display or sound are totally missing, and we
> > still update them on a regular basis to add support for new
> > devices. As such, users are very likely to upgrade the DT from one
> > version to another just because there's new devices available to
> > them. And the newest SoC impacted just got introduced in 4.5, and only
> > has the UART and MMC devices available.
> > 
> > > If people complain about it then it's their mess. For platforms
> > > supported in distros such as debian or fedora, I would strongly
> > > recommend against breaking compatibility.
> > 
> > None of them are officially supported:
> > https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/armhf/ch02s01.html.en
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM#Fedora_23
> > 
> > Only the older one are, and they are not affected by this patch.
> > 
> > > They do ship dtbs, but it's a chicken and egg problem. If dtbs were
> > > stable and provided by firmware, then they wouldn't have to provide
> > > them. If dtbs are unstable, then they have no choice.
> > 
> > And while it might work great on platforms that have all the needed
> > documentation, or a perfect one, which is our case. Almost each
> > release, we discover that something is not working as it was
> > documented, when it was documented in the first place.
> > 
> > It also seems that even on well documented platforms, supported by the
> > vendors, the stable ABI dream is not going to happen:
> > https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/arm/Atmel/README#n105
> > https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/arm/marvell,berlin.txt#n4
> 
> To be quite frank, I completely disagree with that stance.
> 
> It seems like the only reason DT bindings aren't remaining stable is
> because people are deliberately ignoring the requirement and reasoning
> for doing so.

And for DT maintainers saying on multiple occasions that it's bad but
ok to break it and / or that they never actually said that it was a
stable ABI...

I'm guessing it could be a stable ABI if there was bindings
reviews. Rob actually started to review a significant amount of
bindings lately, and that's really appreciated, but if you don't
review all the bindings, then we're going to make mistakes.

> I agree that it can be painful, and that we cannot predict the future.
> There will always be bugs.

In our case, we can't even predict the present.

> Having code in mainline comes with responsibilities. One of those is to
> keep said code working for existing users. Otherwise, why bother having
> it in mainline at all?

None of our existing users ever complained.

Maxime

-- 
Maxime Ripard, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com

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