Hi Frank,
On 04/06/2019 19:20, Frank Rowand wrote:
Hi Phil,
On 6/4/19 5:15 AM, Phil Elwell wrote:
Hi,
In the downstream Raspberry Pi kernel we are using configfs to apply overlays at
runtime, using a patchset from Pantelis that hasn't been accepted upstream yet.
Apart from the occasional need to adapt to upstream changes, this has been working
well for us.
A Raspberry Pi user recently noticed that this mechanism was failing for an overlay in
4.19. Although the overlay appeared to be applied successfully, pinctrl was reporting
that one of the two fragments contained an invalid phandle, and an examination of the
live DT agreed - the target of the reference, which was in the other fragment, was
missing the phandle property.
5.0 added two patches - [1] to stop blindly copying properties from the overlay fragments
into the live tree, and [2] to explicitly copy across the name and phandle properties.
These two commits should be treated as a pair; the former requires the properties that
are legitimately defined by an overlay to be added via a changeset, but this mechanism
deliberately skips the name and phandle; the latter addresses this shortcoming. However,
[1] was back-ported to 4.19 and 4.20 but [2] wasn't, hence the problem.
I have relied upon Greg's statement that he would handle the stable kernels, and that
the process of doing so would not impact (or would minimally impact) maintainers. If
I think something should go into stable, I will tag it as such, but otherwise I ignore
the stable branches. For overlay related code specifically, my base standard is that
overlay support is an under development, not yet ready for prime time feature and thus
I do not tag my overlay patches for stable.
Your research and analysis above sound like there are on target (thanks for providing
the clear and detailed explanation!), so if you want the stable branches to work for
overlays (out of tree, as you mentioned) I would suggest you email Greg, asking that
the second patch be added to the stable branches. Since the two patches you pointed
out are put of a larger series, you might also want to check which of the other
patches in that series were included in stable or left out from stable. My suggestion
that you request Greg add the second patch continues to rely on the concept that
stable does not add to my workload, so I have not carefully analyzed whether adding
the patch actually is the correct and full fix, but instead am relying on your good
judgment that it is.
<useful context snipped>
Thank you - I'll email Greg directly as you suggest, with your answer as supporting
evidence.
Phil
