Re: [GIT PULL] Renesas ARM-based SoC defconfig for v3.8

[Simon Horman <horms@verge.net.au>]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 07:29:30AM +0000, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Thursday 18 October 2012 09:58:11 Simon Horman wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 01:42:29PM +0000, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > > On Wednesday 17 October 2012, Simon Horman wrote:
> > > > Hi Olof, Hi Arnd,
> > > > 
> > > > please consider the following defconfig enhancements for 3.8.
> > > 
> > > These look good to me, but I wonder what happened to the plan to reduce
> > > the number of defconfig files we discussed before. Since you can build
> > > a combined kernel that runs on all (or most) of the supported boards,
> > > can you add a combined shmobile_defconfig that is able to work on
> > > a wide variety of hardware and drop some of the less common defconfig
> > > files?
> > > 
> > > Most of the modern platforms nowadays have just one defconfig that
> > > covers everything.
> > 
> > Hi Arnd,
> > 
> > I wonder if such consolidation only makes sense for boards that
> > make use of DT. If so, I can see that we may be able to come
> > up with a single configuration for the Armadillo800eva, KZM9G
> > and KZM9D boards. But not for older boards such as the Mackerel which
> > have not been converted to use DT.
> 
> Usually you should just be able to enable any boards together,
> independent of whether they are using DT or not. It's possible
> that shmobile does something different from the other platforms
> that I'm not aware of, of course. If you look at e.g.
> omap2plus_defconfig or imx_v6_v7_defconfig, they both enable
> all the available boards.

Thanks, I'll see what I can do within the scope of the boards
that I have access to.

> > I am also wondering if more of the drivers that SH Mobile uses need to
> > become DT aware before a consolidated configuration can work.  In
> > particular, I am thinking about the SCI serial driver and the location of
> > the serial port that can be used for serial console and early printk - this
> > features in the kernel command line of the per-board defconfigs and is
> > relied on by developers.
> 
> Device drivers that don't use DT should get their configuration from
> platform_data. The command line can be used to override those, but it's
> also normally passed by the boot loader, which also has to configure
> e.g. how much memory is present or which uart to use.

Understood.