[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] (group) maintainership models

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Wednesday, July 27, 2016 8:34:06 AM CEST Vinod Koul wrote:
> > One thing we're low on for arm-soc is tooling, I know the x86 guys
> > have quite a bit more than we do in this area, so ideas on what we can
> > do to make our own lives easier is valuable.
> 
> Okay one of the gripes I have is that it is a bit hard to compile arm
> drivers. I regularly compile all drivers in subsystem I maintain and arm
> ones are not always straightforward. Figuring our which config to use
> for compile testing involves a bit of time, which I would like to avoid.
> 
> Having said that stuff like multi_xx_defconfig has improved a bit and
> seem to be in right direction (not an expert at arm arch's) but doesn't
> seem to cover all. Right now I am manually maintaining 4 different arm
> configs to compile test all the drivers in dmaengine subsystem which
> isn't a very big subsystem. For other arch's it is one config per
> subsystem.
> 
> So if you have suggestions to improve my flow, I would like to hear
> that, maybe I am doing something not right here...

We should be at the point where an 'allmodconfig' build on ARM
gets you most of the drivers and builds without warnings (using
gcc-4.9 or higher).

It will take a while to do the entire 'allmodconfig' build but
it's something that can be done as a background task.

One thing that we should still do is figure out which ARM specific
drivers are not included in allmodconfig and find a way to include
them too. Most platforms are compatible with a 'multiplatform'
setup (those that are not very rarely see patches at all and are
less likely to break), but allmodconfig will only include ARMv6
and ARMv7 based platforms, not ARMv4/ARMv4T/ARMv5. I've thought
about adding '|| COMPILE_TEST' dependencies to the platforms
with ARMv4/5 CPUs to have everything included in allmodconfig, but
I haven't actually tied that and I'm sure we'd see a lot of
build failures for correct code at first that we'd have to fix up
to make it work.

	Arnd