On 11/14/22 12:23, Vladimir Oltean wrote: > On Thu, Nov 10, 2022 at 11:56:15AM -0500, Sean Anderson wrote: >> these will probably be in device trees for a year before the kernel >> starts using them. But once that is done, we are free to require them. > > Sorry, you need to propose something that is not "we can break compatibility > with today's device trees one year from now". But only if the kernel gets updated and not the device tree. When can such a situation occur? Are we stuck with this for the next 10 years all because someone may have a device tree which they compiled in 2017, and *insist* on using the latest kernel with? Is this how you run your systems? We don't get the device tree from firmware on this platform; usually it is bundled with the kernel in a FIT or loaded from the same disk partition as the kernel. I can imagine that they might not always be updated at exactly the same time, but this is nuts. The original device tree is broken because it doesn't include compatible strings for devices on a generic bus. There's no way to fix that other than hard-coding the driver. This can be done for some buses, but this is an MDIO bus and we already assume devices without compatibles are PHYs. In the next version of this series, I will include a compatibility function which can bind a driver automatically if one is missing when looking up a phy. But I would really like to have an exit strategy. --Sean
