Criteria for merging new board support files

Criteria for merging new board support files

[Raphael Assenat]

Hello,

We have designed a board based on the AM3505 to use in one of our products,
an unattended payment terminal. I am wondering if it would be meaningful 
to clean up and submit our patches to add support for our board in the 
mainline.

As this board is neither a development/evm platform nor a mass produced 
consumer product, not many users, if ever, will want to customize
their kernel. Therefore I am not sure what the advantages for the 
community at large would be... Besides our code serving as yet another 
board file example.

What is the current maintainer position regarding new board support files? 
Were submissions from people in the same situation ever merged? Do you think
it worth the effort to clean up and submit our board support files?

Best regards,
Raphaël Assénat
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Re: Criteria for merging new board support files

[Tony Lindgren]

Hi,

* Raphael Assenat <raph@8d.com> [120712 14:28]:
> Hello,
> 
> We have designed a board based on the AM3505 to use in one of our products,
> an unattended payment terminal. I am wondering if it would be meaningful 
> to clean up and submit our patches to add support for our board in the 
> mainline.
> 
> As this board is neither a development/evm platform nor a mass produced 
> consumer product, not many users, if ever, will want to customize
> their kernel. Therefore I am not sure what the advantages for the 
> community at large would be... Besides our code serving as yet another 
> board file example.
> 
> What is the current maintainer position regarding new board support files? 
> Were submissions from people in the same situation ever merged? Do you think
> it worth the effort to clean up and submit our board support files?

We're moving towards device tree based booting and the board-*.c files
will be going away except for board-generic.c. No new board-*.c files
will be merged.

I've been carrying some board-*.c files in the testing-board branch,
but we're now at a point where the devicetree based booting should work
for simple cases. Some parts are of course still missing.

So I suggest you just provide a new .dts file for your board. Might be
worth posting the board-*.c file anyways so people can use that if
they want to.

Regards,

Tony