[PATCH v3] Documentation/process: add soc maintainer handbook

Conor Dooley
2023-06-06T08:30:38Z

Arnd suggested that adding a maintainer handbook for the SoC "subsystem"
would be helpful in trying to bring on board maintainers for the various
new platforms cropping up in RISC-V land.

Add a document briefly describing the role of the SoC subsystem and some
basic advice for (new) platform maintainers.

Suggested-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Reviewed-by: Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzysztof.kozlowski@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Conor Dooley <conor.dooley@microchip.com>
---
Changes in v3:
- sort out a rake of spelling/grammar bits spotted by Randy, apart from
the one noted as a suggestion
- drop the refs for document filepaths

Changes in v2:
- add Krzysztof's suggested method for avoiding inter-branch
dependencies
- explicitly mention that tags should be signed
- link to the devicetree abi document, rather than trying to explain it
here & reword that whole section
- fix some typos, capitalisation & unify bullet style

The devicetree abi doc feels quite out of date at this point, and could
probably do with a spring clean - but it also feels like hallowed ground
on which one should tread lightly, so I won't go near that til Rob is
back.
---
.../process/maintainer-handbooks.rst | 3 +-
Documentation/process/maintainer-soc.rst | 177 ++++++++++++++++++
MAINTAINERS | 1 +
3 files changed, 180 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
create mode 100644 Documentation/process/maintainer-soc.rst

diff --git a/Documentation/process/maintainer-handbooks.rst b/Documentation/process/maintainer-handbooks.rst
index d783060b4cc6..fe24cb665fb7 100644
--- a/Documentation/process/maintainer-handbooks.rst
+++ b/Documentation/process/maintainer-handbooks.rst
@@ -15,5 +15,6 @@ Contents:
:numbered:
:maxdepth: 2

- maintainer-tip
maintainer-netdev
+ maintainer-soc
+ maintainer-tip
diff --git a/Documentation/process/maintainer-soc.rst b/Documentation/process/maintainer-soc.rst
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..49f08289d62c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/process/maintainer-soc.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,177 @@
+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+
+=============
+SoC Subsystem
+=============
+
+Overview
+--------
+
+The SoC subsystem is a place of aggregation for SoC-specific code.
+The main components of the subsystem are:
+
+* devicetrees for 32- & 64-bit ARM and RISC-V
+* 32-bit ARM board files (arch/arm/mach*)
+* 32- & 64-bit ARM defconfigs
+* SoC-specific drivers across architectures, in particular for 32- & 64-bit
+ ARM, RISC-V and Loongarch
+
+These "SoC-specific drivers" do not include clock, GPIO etc drivers that have
+other top-level maintainers. The drivers/soc/ directory is generally meant
+for kernel-internal drivers that are used by other drivers to provide SoC-
+specific functionality like identifying an SoC revision or interfacing with
+power domains.
+
+The SoC subsystem also serves as an intermediate location for changes to
+drivers/bus, drivers/firmware, drivers/reset and drivers/memory. The addition
+of new platforms, or the removal of existing ones, often go through the SoC
+tree as a dedicated branch covering multiple subsystems.
+
+The main SoC tree is housed on git.kernel.org:
+ https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/soc/soc.git/
+
+Clearly this is quite a wide range of topics, which no one person, or even
+small group of people are capable of maintaining. Instead, the SoC subsystem
+is comprised of many submaintainers, each taking care of individual platforms
+and driver subdirectories.
+In this regard, "platform" usually refers to a series of SoCs from a given
+vendor, for example, Nvidia's series of Tegra SoCs. Many submaintainers operate
+on a vendor level, responsible for multiple product lines. For several reasons,
+including acquisitions/different business units in a company, things vary
+significantly here. The various submaintainers are documented in the
+MAINTAINERS file.
+
+Most of these submaintainers have their own trees where they stage patches,
+sending pull requests to the main SoC tree. These trees are usually, but not
+always, listed in MAINTAINERS. The main SoC maintainers can be reached via the
+alias soc@kernel.org if there is no platform-specific maintainer, or if they
+are unresponsive.
+
+What the SoC tree is not, however, is a location for architecture-specific code
+changes. Each architecture has its own maintainers that are responsible for
+architectural details, CPU errata and the like.
+
+Information for (new) Submaintainers
+------------------------------------
+
+As new platforms spring up, they often bring with them new submaintainers,
+many of whom work for the silicon vendor, and may not be familiar with the
+process.
+
+Devicetree ABI Stability
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+Perhaps one of the most important things to highlight is that dt-bindings
+document the ABI between the devicetree and the kernel.
+Please read Documentation/devicetree/bindings/ABI.rst.
+
+If changes are being made to a devicetree that are incompatible with old
+kernels, the devicetree patch should not be applied until the driver is, or an
+appropriate time later. Most importantly, any incompatible changes should be
+clearly pointed out in the patch description and pull request, along with the
+expected impact on existing users, such as bootloaders or other operating
+systems.
+
+Driver Branch Dependencies
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+A common problem is synchronizing changes between device drivers and devicetree
+files. Even if a change is compatible in both directions, this may require
+coordinating how the changes get merged through different maintainer trees.
+
+Usually the branch that includes a driver change will also include the
+corresponding change to the devicetree binding description, to ensure they are
+in fact compatible. This means that the devicetree branch can end up causing
+warnings in the "make dtbs_check" step. If a devicetree change depends on
+missing additions to a header file in include/dt-bindings/, it will fail the
+"make dtbs" step and not get merged.
+
+There are multiple ways to deal with this:
+
+* Avoid defining custom macros in include/dt-bindings/ for hardware constants
+ that can be derived from a datasheet -- binding macros in header files should
+ only be used as a last resort if there is no natural way to define a binding
+
+* Use literal values in the devicetree file in place of macros even when a
+ header is required, and change them to the named representation in a
+ following release
+
+* Defer the devicetree changes to a release after the binding and driver have
+ already been merged
+
+* Change the bindings in a shared immutable branch that is used as the base for
+ both the driver change and the devicetree changes
+
+* Add duplicate defines in the devicetree file guarded by an #ifndef section,
+ removing them in a later release
+
+Devicetree Naming Convention
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+The general naming scheme for devicetree files is as follows. The aspects of a
+platform that are set at the SoC level, like CPU cores, are contained in a file
+named $soc.dtsi, for example, jh7100.dtsi. Integration details, that will vary
+from board to board, are described in $soc-$board.dts. An example of this is
+jh7100-beaglev-starlight.dts. Often many boards are variations on a theme, and
+frequently there are intermediate files, such as jh7100-common.dtsi, which sit
+between the $soc.dtsi and $soc-$board.dts files, containing the descriptions of
+common hardware.
+
+Some platforms also have System on Modules, containing an SoC, which are then
+integrated into several different boards. For these platforms, $soc-$som.dtsi
+and $soc-$som-$board.dts are typical.
+
+Directories are usually named after the vendor of the SoC at the time of its
+inclusion, leading to some historical directory names in the tree.
+
+Validating Devicetree Files
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+``make dtbs_check`` can be used to validate that devicetree files are compliant
+with the dt-bindings that describe the ABI. Please read the section
+"Running checks" of Documentation/devicetree/bindings/writing-schema.rst for
+more information on the validation of devicetrees.
+
+For new platforms, or additions to existing ones, ``make dtbs_check`` should not
+add any new warnings. For RISC-V, as it has the advantage of being a newer
+architecture, ``make dtbs_check W=1`` is required to not add any new warnings.
+If in any doubt about a devicetree change, reach out to the devicetree
+maintainers.
+
+Branches and Pull Requests
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+Just as the main SoC tree has several branches, it is expected that
+submaintainers will do the same. Driver, defconfig and devicetree changes should
+all be split into separate branches and appear in separate pull requests to the
+SoC maintainers. Each branch should be usable by itself and avoid
+regressions that originate from dependencies on other branches.
+
+Small sets of patches can also be sent as separate emails to soc@kernel.org,
+grouped into the same categories.
+
+If changes do not fit into the normal patterns, there can be additional
+top-level branches, e.g. for a treewide rework, or the addition of new SoC
+platforms including dts files and drivers.
+
+Branches with a lot of changes can benefit from getting split up into separate
+topics branches, even if they end up getting merged into the same branch of the
+SoC tree. An example here would be one branch for devicetree warning fixes, one
+for a rework and one for newly added boards.
+
+Another common way to split up changes is to send an early pull request with the
+majority of the changes at some point between rc1 and rc4, following up with one
+or more smaller pull requests towards the end of the cycle that can add late
+changes or address problems identified while testing the first set.
+
+While there is no cut-off time for late pull requests, it helps to only send
+small branches as time gets closer to the merge window.
+
+Pull requests for bugfixes for the current release can be sent at any time, but
+again having multiple smaller branches is better than trying to combine too many
+patches into one pull request.
+
+The subject line of a pull request should begin with "[GIT PULL]" and made using
+a signed tag, rather than a branch. This tag should contain a short description
+summarising the changes in the pull request. For more detail on sending pull
+requests, please see Documentation/maintainer/pull-requests.rst.
diff --git a/MAINTAINERS b/MAINTAINERS
index 7e0b87d5aa2e..29631c325857 100644
--- a/MAINTAINERS
+++ b/MAINTAINERS
@@ -1815,6 +1815,7 @@ L: linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org (moderated for non-subscribers)
S: Maintained
C: irc://irc.libera.chat/armlinux
T: git git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/soc/soc.git
+F: Documentation/process/maintainer-soc.rst
F: arch/arm/boot/dts/Makefile
F: arch/arm64/boot/dts/Makefile

--
2.40.1