Hi Bin, Bin Meng <bmeng...@gmail.com> writes:
> So 4.14 definitely was an out-of-tree kernel Everything before 5.2 was out-of-tree. > No one can guarantee an out-of-tree implementation will be > keeping compatible after it's accepted in-tree. Reviewers/maintainers can guarantee compatibility with existing hardware and DT by not instisting on breaking changes. It's not really about keeping in-tree and out-of-tree compatible with each other, but about keeping both of them compatible with the actual hardware and DT of the system the OS is supposed to run on. > Reviewers/maintainers > may have different view from the author on what's the best A reviewer/maintainer could for example have the view that a certain register in a piece of hardware should really be two registers with the bits divided between them based on some logical partitioning. And they might be right. But the hardware is what it is, and if they insist that the driver access two different registers the driver will not work the hardware. You'll have a nice driver that works on nothing (at least until the vendor makes a new spin of the hardware with the two registers). My opinion is that the DT should be treated the same way. It is part of the hardware (sort of the "metadata" for the hardware). Sure you can have some idea of how things could be expressed better and add support for that, but you need to also keep compat with the actual hardware platform that the driver is there to interface against, otherwise the driver won't work. // Marcus _______________________________________________ U-Boot mailing list U-Boot@lists.denx.de https://lists.denx.de/listinfo/u-boot
