Re: linux-next: manual merge of the arm-soc tree with the i2c-embeddedtree

From: Lee Jones
Date: Tue Jul 17 2012 - 09:30:00 EST


On 17/07/12 14:06, Mark Brown wrote:
On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 12:31:08PM +0100, Lee Jones wrote:

I agree with what you say to some extent, but I believe that it is
more important to have a working solution now than to ensure that
each bindings are as unique as possible. After any suggestion of
consolidation, a move from vendor specific to generically defined
Device Tree bindings is trivial. Especially in the current stage
where adaptions and definitions are still fluid.

Obviously some care is taken to ensure the bindings are as generic
as possible, but not to the extent that will put the project back
some months. Over past few months I have enabled many sub-systems;

It's not just about having generic bindings, it's also about having
bindings which have some abstraction and hope of reusability. An awful
lot of bindings are just straight dumps of Linux data structures into
the device tree which don't make a terribly great deal of sense as
bindings.

The Device Tree should supply any platform configuration which the driver needs in order to correctly setup for a particular machine. This is exactly what the platform_data structure did before, hence is is reasonable to assume that whatever information resides in that structure would be required in the Device Tree.

however, I think it would have been a fraction of that if we'd gone
through the laborious process of immediate forced consolidation. I
think it's fine to have platform/vendor specific bindings that work,
then come back to unify them once the dust settles.

In many of these cases we'd be better off just not putting things into
the device tree in the first place, leaving things at the basic "is the
device there" stuff.

Then what do you do with the platform data?

--
Lee Jones
Linaro ST-Ericsson Landing Team Lead
M: +44 77 88 633 515
Linaro.org â Open source software for ARM SoCs
Follow Linaro: Facebook | Twitter | Blog


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