From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Andre Przywara <andre.przywara@arm.com>
Subject: Re: breaking DT compatibility
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2016 15:16:29 +0000
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To: Richard Cochran <richardcochran@gmail.com>, Maxime Ripard <maxime.ripard@free-electrons.com>
Cc: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>, linux-arm-kernel <linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org>, Rob Herring <rob.herring@linaro.org>, Vishnu Patekar <vishnupatekar0510@gmail.com>, Jean-Francois Moine <moinejf@free.fr>, Mike Turquette <mturquette@baylibre.com>, Stephen Boyd <sboyd@codeaurora.org>, Hans de Goede <hdegoede@redhat.com>, Chen-Yu Tsai <wens@csie.org>, Jens Kuske <jenskuske@gmail.com>, Grant Likely <grant.likely@linaro.org>, Frank Rowand <frowand.list@gmail.com>, linux-clk@vger.kernel.org, "devicetree@vger.kernel.org" <devicetree@vger.kernel.org>
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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.