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

[Marek Vasut]

On 11/26/19 5:52 PM, Tom Rini wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 26, 2019 at 05:47:48PM +0100, Marek Vasut wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> And when are you hoping to post an RFC / example?

Currently I have zero time available. Maybe someone else can look into
this option?