Linus: On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 8:56 PM, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > (a) we don't have to be stupid and think it's a good design and an > "opportunity" like you do. The complexity that is the current state of the ARM ecosystem presents the opportunity to find a way to accommodate all those chips within the Linux kernel. If it isn't opportunity, then you must be arguing that we shouldn't add any new ARM SoC support to the kernel. Is that what you are saying? > (b) the kernel source code doesn't have to be the mess of code that > it is. Those things should be abstracted out somehow (and yes, > devicetree is hopefully one way) We are in violent agreement here. > I really don't understand why you seem to be arguing against trying to > fix a real problem, and why you also seem to be arguing that the messy > ARM situation is somehow "good". I find your attitude about the lack > of platform being "good" be to incomprehensibly stupid. There is > absolutely _no_ advantage to anybody from the crazy arm fragmentation. I guess I wasn't being clear. Some of the proposals in this thread seemed to argue for the creation of a one-size-fits-all kernel solution for ARM. I think pursuit of such a solution is a complete waste of time, because it denies the reality that ARM machines aren't very uniform. It's far better to admit to and embrace that diversity than it is to try to deny it. What we have today clearly isn't optimal, and it isn't going to scale much farther. But we can't entertain the option of chucking the whole mess over the wall into bootloader-land, or VHDL-land, or whatever. Those simply aren't options. We have to find a solution that will work in kernel space. > I know, I know, a lot of companies make money supporting the whole > crazy mess. I guess that can make people confused and think that being > messy is good, and could be seen as an advantage. No, I don't think messy is good. And I'm an individual who makes his living making Linux run on ARM (among others) platforms. Messy wastes my time, because I have to deal with the mess rather than making platforms that solve real problems. Messy equates to overhead and tedium. Messy invites error. Messy sucks. > But most embedded companies seem to have realized that they should > move up the stack, rather than worry about some crazy GPIO or stupid > driver details. Now that you mention it, GPIO is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Every ARM chip does that differently. Rather than deny that, David Brownell came up with some code that embraces it. His code might not be perfect, but we're learning as we go along. Same can be said about the kernel's ARM situation as a whole. And I still don't think that ARM is as bad as you think it is. Sure it's ugly, but I don't think it's uglier than SH or PPC. It's just ugly at a larger scale, because there are so many more ARM chips to choose from. Does ARM need some fixing? Yes! But let's be realistic about what forms the solution might take. b.g. -- Bill Gatliff bgat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-omap" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
