[PATCH v7 14/31] arm: highbank: Add devicetree files

Tom Rini trini at konsulko.com
Tue Dec 7 16:25:16 CET 2021


On Tue, Dec 07, 2021 at 12:59:48AM +0000, Andre Przywara wrote:
> On Mon,  6 Dec 2021 17:11:52 -0700
> Simon Glass <sjg at chromium.org> wrote:
> 
> > Sync these files, obtained from Linux v5.15.
> 
> Sorry, but this would be wrong.
> How do you know which board it is? Highbank or Midway? We use the
> same binary for both, and decide either by the DT nodes we find in DRAM
> or by some autodetection (Cortex-A9 vs. Cortex-A15) if there are
> differences. The memory size would possibly be wrong (it's a DIMM slot).
> If you need *some* DT for build reasons, whatever, but at least go with
> the empty stub.
> 
> And I still don't get this whole development argument: Why would
> anyone need some random or partial DT sample in the U-Boot tree to do
> development?
> If people develop a driver, the document to code against is the
> *binding* documentation, which describes what to expect from the DT
> nodes. Then you *test* it against an actual tree, but on the actual
> hardware, in which case you get the actual DTB, from the board.
> If a developer needs to take a sneak peek into an actual DTB,
> there are so many simple ways to do that: QEMU's dumpdtb, RPi's SD
> card content, U-Boot's "fdt addr $fdtcontroladdr; fdt print", the
> kernel's /sys/firmware/devicetree/base, ... When you port U-Boot to a
> board, getting hands on the actual DT is probably the least of your
> problems.
> 
> So why would we need some mostly wrong DTs in the U-Boot tree?
> It seems to suggest that you can hack the DT to make things work, but
> this sounds bonkers, as the real DTB comes from somewhere else (SPI
> flash, SD card, generated based on command line), and patching U-Boot's
> copy to make things work is just wishful thinking.
> 
> I can see the hacker's desire to play around with the DTB from time
> to time (What happens if the GPIO is wrong? Can we deal with two
> instances of the same device?), but for those experiments there are
> plenty of ways to achieve this - and be it temporarily replacing the
> empty DT stub. I just feel that bending the (board's) DT design ideas
> for a hacker's pleasure is not justified.

This, largely, is why I still don't understand or agree with the
direction this series is taking platforms that currently use
CONFIG_OF_BOARD=y today.

-- 
Tom
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