Re: [PATCH 0/2] Common struct clk implementation, v14

[Russell King - ARM Linux <linux@arm.linux.org.uk>]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 08:25:05PM +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-04-14 at 11:00 +0100, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> > 
> > I will take it, but at the moment I'm rather unhappy about the response
> > from the community to Linus' complaint.
> > 
> > If existing platform maintainers can show that moving over to this will
> > result in a net reduction of code under arch/arm, then that will be good.
> > What I don't want to see at the moment is arch/arm increasing in size as
> > a result of any change.  We desperately need to see a reduction for the
> > next merge window.
> 
> It's a chicken and egg... platform maintainers wait for you to take it
> and you wait for them to take it :-)
> 
> It seems to me that this fits well into the category of "better common
> abstractions" that was discussed in the thread initiated by Linus as one
> of the ways to improve on the "clutter"...

That depends - sometimes creating generic stuff results in a net increase
in the overall size, and that's something that Linus also complained about.

According to linux-next, where we are at the moment with arch/arm is a
net increase of 6000 lines since the close of the last merge window,
and arch/arm is responsible for almost 75% of arch/ changes.  It looks
very much like the same situation which Linus complained about.

Can arch/arm continue to increase in size?  I think not.  We desperately
need patches which reduce the size of arch/arm, and we desperately need
them *now*.