[PATCH v4 00/11] An effort to bring DT bindings compliance within U-Boot

[Tom Rini]

On Mon, Jan 22, 2024 at 11:45:15AM +0000, Andre Przywara wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Jan 2024 16:05:36 +0530
> Sumit Garg <sumit.garg at linaro.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I certainly welcome this more automatic synchronisation of the DTs,
> however have one comment about the upcoming sync process:
> 
> > ...
> > However, Linux kernel DT maintainers proposed [2] for U-Boot to rather
> > use devicetree-rebasing repo [3] which is a forked copy from Linux
> > kernel for DT source files as well as bindings. It is tagged at every
> > Linux kernel major release or intermideate release candidates. So here I
> > have tried to reuse that to bring DT bingings compliance as well as a
> > standard way to maintain a regular sync of DT source files with Linux
> > kernel.
> > 
> > In order to maintain devicetree files sync, U-Boot will maintains a Git
> > subtree for devicetee-rebasing repo as `dts/upstream` sub-directory.
> > U-Boot will regularly sync `dts/upstream/` subtree whenever the next window
> > opens with the next available kernel major release.
> 
> I hope this doesn't need to stay that restricted? Can we either sync more
> often, or at least on the kernel's -rc1, and not only on a "full" release?
> 
> The reason I ask is that we have a chicken-egg problem here: without a DT
> merged into the kernel tree, no U-Boot board support can be merged. And
> without U-Boot support, we cannot boot a kernel, at least not in the
> canonical way.
> 
> Since the U-Boot and kernel merge windows are not in phase, for sunxi I try
> to sync the kernel DTs either as early as possible (-rc1, sometimes even
> before, when the maintainers have merged them into their tree), or
> sometimes "out of season", if a board defconfig patch is coming up.
> 
> Otherwise new board support, which typically has a very low regression risk
> for the rest of the code base, would need to be delayed until the next
> release. In the worst case the U-Boot merge windows opens one week before
> a kernel release, then new boards need to wait three months?

Would it be to bad to bring in board X with OF_UPSTREAM=n for one U-Boot
release, and then with the next one switch to OF_UPSTREAM=y (and delete
the dts from arch/) for the next release, when we would have gotten back
in sync?

-- 
Tom
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