I'd like to get a discussion going about submitting the Android sync driver to staging.
I know there is currently some very similar work going on with the dmabuf-fences, and rather then both approaches being worked out individually on their own, I suspect there could be better collaboration around this effort.
So my proposal is that we merge the Android sync driver into staging.
In my mind, this has the following benefits: 1) It allows other drivers that depend on the sync interface to also be submitted to staging, rather then forcing those drivers to be hidden away in various out of tree git repos, location unknown.
2) It would provide a baseline view to the upstream community of the interface Android is using, providing a real-world, active use case of the functionality.
Once the sync driver is in staging, if the dmabuf-fences work is fully sufficient to replace the Android sync driver, we should be able to whittle down the sync driver until its just a interface shim (and at which point efforts can be made to convert Android userland over to dmabuf-fences).
However, if the dmabuf-fences work is not fully sufficient to replace the android sync driver, we should be able to at least to whittle down the driver to those specific differences, which would provide a concrete example of where the dmabuf-fences, or other work may need to be expanded, or if maybe the sync driver is the better approach.
I've gone through the Android tree and reworked the sync driver to live in staging, while still preserving the full patch history/authorship. You can checkout the reworked patch queue here: http://git.linaro.org/gitweb?p=people/jstultz/android-dev.git%3Ba=shortlog%3...
If folks would take a look and let me know what they think of the changes as well as what they think about pushing it to staging, or other ideas for how to improve collaboration so we can have common interfaces here, I'd appreciate it.
Also note: I've done this so far without any feedback from the Android devs (despite my reaching out to Erik a few times recently), so if they object to pushing it to staging, in deference to it being their code I'll back off, even though I do think it would be good to have the code get more visibility upstream in staging. I don't mean to step on anyone's toes. :)
thanks -john