On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 11:16 AM, Warner Losh <imp@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 8:58 AM, Daniel Lezcano > <daniel.lezcano@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Hi Rob, dt people, >> >> is it acceptable a driver is changed using a new DT binding but becomes >> incompatible with the old DT files ? >> >> IOW, is it possible to change the DT and the driver without supporting the old >> DT format, forcing an update of the DT and the kernel ? > > I've seen new properties many times added, even though the new driver > wouldn't work quite right on old DT files. I've also seen people > create a new hardware compatibility name for a totally new binding. > Finally, I've seen the bindings just randomly change for no reason > with no concern for backwards compat. The last really sucks if you > have a driver that's not in the Linux tree (say, because it's a > FreeBSD driver). Hopefully that is getting better? If not, how do we make it better? I try to prevent it through reviews, but I have have no visibility into what FreeBSD does and doesn't care about. The common suggestion is moving the bindings out of the kernel. The biggest issue I have with that is that we would lose the review of all the kernel subsystem maintainers. They may be biased toward Linux, but they know their class of h/w and no other project has the breath of h/w support. Rob -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe devicetree" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
