[U-Boot] [SoCFPGA] next steps

[Marek Vasut]

On Thursday, October 09, 2014 at 01:20:23 PM, Jagan Teki wrote:
> On 9 October 2014 14:07, Michal Simek <monstr at monstr.eu> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > On 10/08/2014 10:09 PM, Tom Rini wrote:
> >> On Wed, Oct 08, 2014 at 10:58:24AM +0200, Michal Simek wrote:
> >>> Hi,
> >>> 
> >>> On 10/07/2014 02:45 PM, Marek Vasut wrote:
> >>>> Hey,
> >>>> 
> >>>> given that we now have most of the u-boot socfpga stuff in mainline, I
> >>>> decided it would be a good idea to list what we're still missing and
> >>>> we should also decide how to move on now.
> >>>> 
> >>>> First thing I should probably clarify is the late acceptance of the
> >>>> socfpga patches. This is certainly not something we do regularly and
> >>>> is one of the worst possible practices to do, but this time it felt
> >>>> rather important to get the platform in shape, so this exception
> >>>> happened. Furthermore, all of the code in u-boot-socfpga should be
> >>>> based on u-boot-arm and should be submitted through the u-boot-arm
> >>>> repository, not directly to u-boot .
> >>> 
> >>> Platform was in this shape for a while that's why I can't see the
> >>> reason why this happen.
> >>> 
> >>> Tom: Does it mean that every platform which is not in good shape can
> >>> go directly to the mainline in any time? It is definitely something
> >>> which is good to know.
> >> 
> >> So, it's a long standing thing where for non-core changes, deferring to
> >> the relevant custodian about what's going to come in close to the
> >> release is what's done.  So yes, I grilled Marek about what non-socfpga
> >> things would be impacted by the changes (RPi) and if he'd tested things
> >> there.  It all had been through a few post/review cycles.
> >> 
> >> There's an argument to be made that we shouldn't have let socfpga in,
> >> back in 2012 or should have pushed harder, sooner, to get more progress
> >> made on "real" platform support.
> > 
> > AFAIK if platform is working in certain state and you are able to get
> > for example console than there is no problem to be in. There is nowhere
> > written what exactly should work that's why I can't see any problem
> > that socfpga is in if it is not causing compilation issues and have at
> > least minimum functionality.
> > 
> > The question was if the problem was that Altera just failed because
> > didn't collect patches to any repo and sending it to Albert.
> > Or there was just misunderstanding that Albert expected that Altera
> > will do that and Altera expected that Albert will pick it up
> > because he is ARM custodian and none was listed for socfpga.
> > I have to defend Altera guys because if none is listed for SocFpga
> > the nearest maintainer is collecting patches.
> > 
> > Then there was discussion that none did care about socfpga patches
> > and problem was resolved by creating socfpga repository and Marek became
> > custodian for it. Marek collected that patches to the new repo and
> > also I believe add new one and rebased them on the top of current tree
> > and send them out as one big 51 series which is not possible to even
> > properly review.
> > IMHO they should be sent separated to target exact audience which do care
> > about spi/i2c/watchdog/fpga/soc etc. But maybe that's just matter of
> > taste.
> > 
> > But I am still missing the point why that patches was that urgent
> > that they were merged to rc3 when it was claimed that socfpga was in a
> > wrong shape for a while. It means v2014.10 should be just another broken
> > version for socfpga and all this mess should be solved properly in
> > 2015.01 via socfpga repo.
> > 
> > And because patches went into rc3 and yesterday Jeroen is reporting
> > problem on FreeBSD because of this
> > merge.(http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/397453/)
> > 
> > Regarding your point that all "It all had been through a few post/review
> > cycles." I don't think all things have been fixed.
> > Personally me I have reported here
> > http://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2014-September/189741.html
> > (sha1: 0ae16cbb40a2881f6dfbe00fcb023ee7b548bc5c)
> > issue with checkpatch.pl which hasn't been fixed.
> > 
> > Here is my ACK for one patch which is not present in mainline commit
> > http://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2014-September/189747.html
> > (sha1: 2f210639c4f003b0d5310273979441f1bfc88eae)
> > 
> > Make no sense to go through all patches but this is just an example.
> > 
> > 
> > I think it is something what we should discuss at u-boot mini summit
> > on Monday. I discussed this with Marek over IRC yesterday and I expect
> > he will ping me today (because of this email :-) ).
> > 
> > If there is a problem because Albert is just too busy we should at least
> > try to find out any reasonable way how to handle this. Like in Linux
> > ARM-SOC custodian?
> 
> I think this traversing the actual development process in a different
> direction and it must be a valid point that need to discuss.
> 
> Apart from this, I'm experienced an another isuue where some of the
> subsystem patches (say for example spi stuff) are pushed in a different
> direction. http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/346015/
> 
> These are the qspi stuff from freescale, and I didn't understand why
> these goes into
> u-boot-arm/master. And there is no intimation of mine as well.

Did you comment on them at all please ? While I disagree with them bypassing 
your tree, I see they were rotting on the ML for a month and then Albert then
picked those.

> Issue is that the driver itself is not in a proper shape, why does
> subsystem patches were
> pushed without the the review tag from a respective custodians.

I produced a hypothesis above.

Can you retroactively comment on them and ask the author to fix the code?

> Please try to discuss this point as well "Each subsystem patch(es)
> should be pushed
> if and only if the respective custodian should marked the review tag"

I agree we have an issue here, but I would suggest we move this discussion
into a separate thread now. The subject of the email does not match the
topic of the thread by far.