[U-Boot] [U-Boot-Custodians] [U-Boot-Board-Maintainers] [RFC] Eliminate boards not using CONFIG_DM=y

[Marek Vasut]

On 11/26/19 5:26 PM, Tom Rini wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 26, 2019 at 09:11:51AM +0100, Marek Vasut wrote:
>> On 11/26/19 12:16 AM, Heinrich Schuchardt wrote:
>>> Dear maintainers,
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>>> we have been trying to move to the driver model for several years now.
>>> Starting in 2018 we have added warnings to the Makefile that boards not
>>> supporting the driver model will be eliminated. Still 24 % of the
>>> configuration files have not been converted and do not even use
>>> CONFIG_DM=y.
>>>
>>> If we want to get rid of legacy drivers, at some point we have to remove
>>> the 347 configuration files in the list below not using the driver model.
>>>
>>> I suggest to do this directly after the release of v2020.01 scheduled
>>> January 6th.
>>>
>>> This should not stop the maintainers from reinserting the boards after
>>> conversion to the driver model.
>>
>> Some boards just cannot accommodate this DM stuff. For those boards,
>> it's just bloat without any useful added value. Hence, these boards
>> would be removed because they cannot accommodate arbitrary bloat. This
>> makes U-Boot not-so-universal bootloader anymore, but rather a bloated one.
>>
>> I don't think we can force boards out or impose DM on everyone unless we
>> can solve this bloat issue first.
> 
> As someone who was involved in creating this DM stuff, do you have some
> ideas on addressing things?  Given that you're responsible for a number
> of these platforms and can test out some ideas on them, what are you
> suggesting?

How about directly calling driver functions for drivers which have
single instance only ? Then we could optimize out all the DM overhead
for that.