Hi Jason, On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 11:04:28AM -0600, Jason Gunthorpe wrote: > On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 09:22:10AM -0700, Brian Norris wrote: > > > Are you trying to use this binding, or is this just purely a mechanical > > documentation issue? I ask, because it seems that binding never really > > got reviewed at all, and others have recently tried to extend > > support > > I wrote it before ARM started down the DT direction and all these > formalities were developed. > > > That's not to say we can't document the old one, but I'm curious if > > there are real users. I'd also like to encourage new users to avoid the > > old one if we can make that feasible. > > We continue to use it here, Good to know. > there is just no way to autodetect flash > partition layouts. Right. It'd be lovely if things were more standardized, and we could just build all parsers in for all MTDs, like how block devices do it, but sadly that's probably not feasible, given the quirks of various parsers, and how they often require scanning a large portion of the device :( > I'm not fussed about having to change to something > else in future. OK, good to know. Recent developments have put maintainers in a tough position sometimes, since as soon as there's a DT binding used in the wild, some people like to claim that it is ABI and must never change. This ties the hands when wanting to deprecate/improve/replace features. In reality, there are few (my guess: a negligible near-zero-percent) DT users that actually have DTs locked into some kind of firmware in a way that they (1) can never update their DT and (2) expect to be able to run mainline kernels, so this all just becomes a lot of fuss over nothing. > The reason the original patch exposed the cmdline parser is because > that is how the internal mechanisms work Right. And that's why it's best these days not to directly expose internal mechanisms via DT. > - but realistically, the > cmdline parser is a hack to get around the lack of DT partition > description. If the DT can describe the partitions it should supersede > and obsolete the old command line hack. IMHO Hmm, I don't know. I wouldn't expect people should really be using cmdlineparts as a production solution, but I'd consider it more of a debugging/development option -- if I want to override the DT (which is sometimes a bit harder to change) or the on-flash layout (e.g., RedBoot), then I can fiddle with the command line. So I wouldn't quite qualify it as a hack (though many might use it in a hacky way) nor would I suggest that the DT should override it. > > Also, if we're really going to support this, we should list exactly what > > strings we support. And that's one of the problems with the existing > > binding; it supports any old string Linux supports, which doesn't match > > how we typically want to add bindings (i.e., via proposal + review). > > That is why it is prefixed with linux, the review of the part parser name is > the responsibility of the MTD crew, not the DT folks. OK. That works for now. But I don't want to extend this binding to any other drivers, if I can help it. And I don't want to encourage it (lest it *really* becomes ABI). I don't think it would be too hard to fix this to not be so Linux-specific. I think any partition layouts that people would want to specify in DT can be reasonably well-defined to not consider them Linux-specific. Some probably didn't even have a Linux target in mind when they were developed. We'd just need to give them better names and a short description and/or pointers to documentation. e.g. [1][2]. > bcm47xxpart seems like a terrible name for a partition scheme. Really, > almost any scheme can be used on any SOC, naming a partition parser > after a SOC family makes very little sense to me.. I believe it was defined purely by Broadcom, for use with their firmwares mostly seen on that SoC family. And in the spirit of DT naming, IP often gets named after the first SoC that implements it, even if later revs aren't the same SoC (or SoC family) but are still compatible. So I can see the name being reasonable, even if not perfect. Any better nominations for names? Brian [1] http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.dui0102g/DUI0102F_afs1_4_rg.pdf [2] https://sourceware.org/redboot/ -- 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
