Re: breaking DT compatibility

[Andre Przywara <andre.przywara@arm.com>]

Hi,

On 11/02/16 14:51, Richard Cochran wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 11:00:48AM +0100, Maxime Ripard wrote:
>> None of our existing users ever complained.
> 
> Note to self:
> 
>    Avoid choosing this SoC for new projects.  The maintainers do not
>    care about the end users.

Now that's a bit harsh, I think.
Maxime is doing a great job for maintaining this admittedly not very
well architected and documented SoC "family" - in his spare time.

Also the actual end user experience is probably just fine (despite
broken DT compatibility), since on these storage-less boards the
distributions usually ship DT, firmware (U-Boot) and kernel bundled
together.
This does not qualify for breaking the DT deliberately, but we are about
to fix this as we speak.

Also my concern was just that I wanted to move away from this being the
only way of running Linux on those boards.

We may think about collecting DTBs and firmware for those boards in a
central place without direct connection to a certain Linux version or
distribution. This would make the whole idea more visible and would make
compatibility breaks more evident.

Cheers,
Andre.