On 3 May 2012 06:50, Arnd Bergmann arnd@arndb.de wrote:
Hi everyone,
I've been discussing multiplatform kernels with a few people recently, and we will have a lot of discussion sessions about this at Linaro Connect in Hong Kong.
One question that came up repeatedly is whether we should support all possible board files for each platform in a multiplatform kernel, or just the ones that are already using DT probing. I would like to get a quick poll of opinions on that and I've tried to put those people on Cc that would be most impacted by this, i.e. the maintainers for platforms that have both DT and non-DT board files at the moment.
My feeling is that we should just mandate DT booting for multiplatform kernels, because it significantly reduces the combinatorial space at compile time, avoids a lot of legacy board files that we cannot test anyway, reduces the total kernel size and gives an incentive for people to move forward to DT with their existing boards.
+1
I'm of the opinion that we support DT only platforms for multi-platform but this is based on the approach of only caring for multi-platform for newer systems and not worrying too much for legacy HW. I look at this from the perspective of how much return do we get on investing effort into making it possible for every platform to be built as part of consolidated zImage. I don't expect distros (the main users of a single zImage IMHO) to spend many cycles on older platforms and those of us who still have some of them sitting around to use are generally developers who are going to be doing a lot of builds anyways...
~Deepak