Re: [PATCH V3 2/3] regulator: dt: regulator match byregulator-compatible

From: Mark Brown
Date: Thu Jun 21 2012 - 15:45:43 EST


On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 05:17:45PM +0000, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Thursday 21 June 2012, Mark Brown wrote:

> > I'm not that big a fan of moving all the data into device tree as it
> > means that you need even more parsing code and you need to update the
> > device trees for every board out there every time you want to add
> > support for a new feature which doesn't seem like a win. Right now with
> > the DT kept in the kernel it's not so bad but if we ever do start
> > distributing it separately it becomes more of an issue.

> Right. It's certainly a trade-off. If a company makes 100 SoCs that
> all have similar-but-different regulators, then it should be clear
> win to have the driver be very abstract and fed with DT data for
> configuragtion.

Well, nobody does that anyway but even if they were it doesn't help
non-DT systems at all, nor does it help when we need to go and add new
properties to every existing device tree using the device. We've got
far more architectures don't use DT than do...

> > I'm also not sure if the tooling works well for allowing people to
> > include standard DTs for chips and add new properties to nodes for the
> > board specific configuration, though I think I've seen a few things
> > which suggested that was dealt with reasonably well.

> It should never be necessary to add board-specific properties in the
> nodes that describe the SoC specific bits. What I was referring to
> is just moving the data that currently resides in the regulator
> driver into DT.

How would this work given that we also need to put system specific
configuration for the same devices into DT? As Stephen says it doesn't
seem to match what we're currently doing.

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