Hello, I'd like to chime in with some feedback.
> >> Hence, the usecases for this kind of splitting are:
> >> 1. Somewhat rare (corner) cases: someone may not want to compile in any of
> >> the mm/venc/vdec/mfg clock drivers because they don't need the
> >> functionality at all (probably, including the other related drivers), or;
> >> 2. It would be possible to compile as built-in only the "main" drivers
> >> (apmixed, infra, peri, topck) to achieve a boot (ex.: you need eMMC to
> >> boot, at least) and then compile the mm/venc/vdec/mfg as modules to be
> >> loaded after mounting a rootfs (where you probably also have mediatek-drm,
> >> vcodec, etc as modules).
> >
> > I assume you mean split them into two groups:
> >
> > - essential for booting to a state capable of loading modules from
> > storage So apmixedsys + topckgen + infra_ao + peri_ao + imp_iic_wrap
> > (maybe?)
> > - everything else
> { snip }
> > IMO having two Kconfig symbols for one chip is still much better than
> > having ten though.
This sounds good.
I think it would've been even better if selecting a Kconfig option like
MACH_MT6795 would automatically select the base clock driver for booting to a
state capable of loading modules from storage. But a quick check showed me that
arm64 doesn't use such an approach unlike arm.
> For MT8195... and 92, 83, 73... and others from the same era, being them for
> chromebooks, iot, smartphones and whatever else... yeah you're totally right.
>
> The issue starts raising when looking at older SoCs featuring an older
> bootloader that does have a kernel size limitation; for example, to make the
> loader happy on MT6795, I had to strip the defconfig a lot and keep the
> Android-style boot.img smaller than 10MB (that's Image.gz-dtb + ramdisk).
This issue gets even more relevant if/when we consider older ARM32 SoCs such as
mt65xx series. As far as I know, most of them (with a notable exception of
mt6580) have bootloaders that restrict max boot.img size to 6144 kB.
However, I think too much granularity in Kconfig might cause unnecessary
confusion. The "essential clock infra" + "everything else" split sounds better
to me.
