Re: common location for devicetree files

[Kumar Gala <galak@codeaurora.org>]

On Nov 8, 2013, at 12:13 PM, Jason Cooper wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 11:59:56AM -0600, Kumar Gala wrote:
>> 
>> On Nov 8, 2013, at 10:52 AM, Jason Cooper wrote:
>> 
>>> On Thu, Nov 07, 2013 at 05:21:58PM -0600, Kumar Gala wrote:
>>>> As we start having more sharing of device trees between architectures
>>>> (arm & arm64, arm & powerpc, guessing maybe mips & arm) we need dts to
>>>> live in location that 
>>>> 
>>>> I was wondering what people felt about doing:
>>>> 
>>>> 	arch/dts/<VENDOR>/
>>>> 
>>>> as a common location that could be shared.  I'm up for other
>>>> suggestions.
>>> 
>>> What do we really need to do before the move?  Should all arch dts files
>>> be able to #include from any arch?  What's the minimum churn needed to
>>> accomplish that?  Maybe just move the needed bits to arch/dts/include/ ?
>>> 
>>> I'm not real keen on separating by vendor.  For example, us mvebu folks
>>> would probably miss useful/duplicated effort in another vendor's
>>> subdirectory.  Which was the whole reason for moving driver code out of
>>> machine directories to begin with.
>> 
>> 
>> Can you explain that further, what would you miss from other vendors.
>> All the patches should still be going via devicetree ML.
> 
> I was simply applying the same logic used to justify moving all of the
> driver code out of arch/arm/.  Once that happened, a lot of patterns
> emerged and we have things like common clock now.  Yet all of this code
> (originally under arch/arm) was submitted to the same ML.
> 
> iow, there's a difference between being on the same high-traffic
> mailinglist where people are filtering out just what they need, and
> being in the same subdirectory, right next to three other
> implementations of the same code (I exaggerate, but the point remains).
> It's a lot easier to spot similar implementations when they are all
> congregated under one directory.
> 
> How many boards are using the same PMIC across vendors?  Would it make
> sense to have a tps6905.dtsi they could all include?  Flash chips?  I'm
> just asking.
> 
> My gut is that having separate vendor directories would lead to
> balkanization.  That might not be a problem, but it's worth considering.
> 
> thx,
> 
> Jason.

I get the point, just not sure how else to sort the 800+ .dts{i} files that we have in the kernel tree right now.

I think common patterns have to be looked at by various maintainers.

- k

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