On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 09:08:23AM +0800, Andy Green wrote:
However this LKS kernel will definitely make tracking activity harder for us. The problem will be all the driver integration focus at the member will be at LKS kernel and not tracking. Since LKS has a direct line to product ship date, parallel driver integration at later tracking kernel they're not shipping will seem like a distraction. We could do the driver integration engineering work at tracking and backport to LKS, but this really is needlessly inefficient from product-focused observer POV.
So, as David said this won't cover everything Linaro does so hopefully people will want to track our development stuff to play with those toys.
The other thing I'd point out here is that people are already shipping products based on stable kernels today; the issues you mention are there already and ignoring them doesn't make them go away. If anything us providing some of the backport will hopefully avoid people needing to spend time doing that for themselves which ought to be helpful.
That's not really it - the trick is to keep the active parts of the code in sync with each other to minimise redundant development and there's other ways of doing that than doing a single binary for multiple boards that people have already figured out. By the time you get to actually shipping most of the effort is on QA anyway which for thoroughness needs to be on a per system basis.
The QA certainly needs to be done individually on the final system. We'll see the impact (or not) as we go, but at least nothing about DT and ARCH_MULTIPLATFORM stops them having a single source tree and doing it the old way for as long as they like. But I expect we see reasons why one kernel binary will become highly interesting and eliminate a lot of work for people that embrace it.
It certainly won't hurt but I'd not oversell what it's going to achieve; remember that the kernel is just one piece in the jigsaw here.
Generally though the llct idea is adding things before upstream because they're desirable even at the current version. So there should at least be a chance they each might be candidates for backport treatment in LKS.
There will be, as the process thing I posted at the top of the thread said things like that should have a reference to the current development so we can track them on their way upstream.