Re: [PATCH 0/8] ARM: sun8i: a33: Mali improvements

[Emil Velikov]

On 17 February 2017 at 12:45, Tobias Jakobi
<tjakobi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello Maxime,
>
> Maxime Ripard wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 01:43:06PM +0100, Tobias Jakobi wrote:
>>> I was wondering about the following. Wasn't there some strict
>>> requirement about code going upstream, which also included that there
>>> was a full open-source driver stack for it?
>>>
>>> I don't see how this is the case for Mali, neither in the kernel, nor in
>>> userspace. I'm aware that the Mali kernel driver is open-source. But it
>>> is not upstream, maintained out of tree, and won't land upstream in its
>>> current form (no resemblence to a DRM driver at all). And let's not talk
>>> about the userspace part.
>>>
>>> So, why should this be here?
>>
>> The device tree is a representation of the hardware itself. The state
>> of the driver support doesn't change the hardware you're running on,
>> just like your BIOS/UEFI on x86 won't change the device it reports to
>> Linux based on whether it has a driver for it.
> Like Emil already said, the new bindings and the DT entries are solely
> introduced to support a proprietary out-of-tree module.
>
> The current workflow when introducing new DT entries is the following:
> - upstream a driver that uses the entries
> - THEN add the new entries
>
That's the ideal route that I was thinking of.

At the same time, if prominent DRM people believe that we can/should
turn a blind eye, so be it.
I'm not trying to make Maxime's life hard, but point out that things
feel iffy IMHO.

Thanks
Emil