[Ksummit-discuss] Devicetree Workshop at Kernel Summit Prague (26 Oct 2017)

Andre Przywara andre.przywara at arm.com
Wed Oct 18 16:05:35 UTC 2017


Hi,

On 18/10/17 16:32, Rob Herring wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 9:28 AM, Andre Przywara <andre.przywara at arm.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 18/10/17 15:04, Michal Simek wrote:
>>> On 16.10.2017 16:11, Rob Herring wrote:
>>>> On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 12:36 AM, Michal Simek <monstr at monstr.eu> wrote:
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> On 9.10.2017 22:39, Grant Likely wrote:
>>>>>> Kernel Summit is now just over 2 weeks away and it is time to pull
>>>>>> together the schedule for the Devicetree workshop. Originally I
>>>>>> planned on just an afternoon, but I've got the room for the whole day,
>>>>>> so I've got a lot of flexibility on the schedule. Unscheduled time can
>>>>>> be used for hacking.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Date: 26 Oct 2017
>>>>>> Time: 9:00am-5:30pm (Lunch from 12:30-2:30)
>>>>>> Location: Athens room - Hilton Prague
>>>>>>
>>>>>> If you plan to attend, make sure you update your OSSunmitE/ELCE
>>>>>> registration to include the DT Workshop (log in to access and modify
>>>>>> your registration):
>>>>>>
>>>>>> https://www.regonline.com/register/login.aspx?eventID=1883377&MethodId=0&EventsessionId=&Email_Address=&membershipID=
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Here is my current list of topics in no particular order, including
>>>>>> the topic moderator:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Runtime memory consumption (Rob Herring)
>>>>>> Overlay maintenance plan (TBC)
>>>>>> Stable ABI for devicetree (TBC)
>>>>>> DT YAML encoding (Pantelis Antoniou)
>>>>>> DT Schema format - option 1 (Pantelis Antoniou)
>>>>>> DT Schema format - option 2 (Grant Likely)
>>>>>> Sharing Generic bindings (TBC)
>>>>>> devicetree.org update (Grant)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Reply to this email if you want to propose another topic.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Reply privately if there is a particular topic you want to attend but
>>>>>> you are unable to be there in the morning or afternoon. I'll put the
>>>>>> actual agenda together a week out from the event.
>>>>>
>>>>> I would like to talk how to add support for AArch32 based on arm64 dts file.
>>>>
>>>> We already have that for RPi3, but it's a bit hacky in that you have
>>>> to include files from one arch to the other. What I'd like to see
>>>> ideally is no dependency on $ARCH to build dts files. You can't build
>>>> dts files for an arch without a cross-compiler installed which is an
>>>> artificial dependency. The dtb should be independent of whether you're
>>>> building for 32 or 64 bit.
>>>
>>> I wasn't aware about RPI3 but yes - I have seen the same for ZynqMP.
>>>
>>>>
>>>> There's the other aspect of being able to do armv8 32-bit builds as
>>>> there's no explicit support for v8 in arch/arm/. But that's not a DT
>>>> issue.
>>>
>>> Yep including Kconfig.platforms is required.
>>>
>>>>
>>>>> And next topic is discuss criteria for adding new DTS board files to
>>>>> kernel for supporting custom boards especially for arm32 which can end
>>>>> up with a lot of dts files in this folder.
>>>>
>>>> We really should move the arm32 files into subdirs for each SoC vendor
>>>> IMO, but I think armsoc maintainers have been against that churn.
>>>
>>> As you said above maybe we should consider to move all DTS files out of
>>> arch folder and sorted them based on SoC vendor. It sounds like a good
>>> topic to discuss.
> 
> That is 2 separate topics really. For the latter, you need to come up
> with reasons to justify the churn.
> 
>>>>> If make sense to permit only boards with something new or just enable
>>>>> reference boards to go in.
>>>>
>>>> The board dts files are generally pretty minimal. What's the issue
>>>> here? Just lots of files in arch/arm/boot/dts?
>>>
>>> yep. A lot of files there.
> 
> Are we approaching the limits of # of files in one directory? Is
> Arnd/Olof or Linus complaining about there being too many files to
> maintain? Do sub-arch maintainers not know which files are theirs?
> What problem are we trying to solve here?
> 
> If we're talking about moving bindings and dts files out of the
> kernel, then call it that. Otherwise, let's not mix the topics. Unless
> you want nothing to happen then tie it to moving to a separate
> repository.
> 
>> I was wondering whether we should really stop providing .dts files for
>> *boards* in the *kernel* tree. In my impression this was more a stop-gap
>> measure to bridge the transition from board files to DT.
> 
> Not really. A stop-gap would be a couple of kernel cycles in my mind.
> PPC dts files have been there forever practically.
> 
>> Given that the particular board files are rather boring anyway, wouldn't
>> it be sufficient to just include the SoC .dtsi plus one (or two) example
>> .dts, for instance for the official evaluation board?
> 
> That sounds horrible to manage. You are assuming the split between
> board and SoC specifics are done perfectly from the start. I haven't
> checked the history, but I'm going to guess that has not been the
> case. That would effectively make the split be an ABI. Folks have
> enough issues with the entire dtb being an ABI.

I agree that we should not create an ABI between the SoC's .dtsi the
board's .dts files. But eventually people would put *.dtbs* on their
boards, so we don't really care, as long as they are created from the
right combination of both.
At the end of the day a vendor actually doesn't really need to provide a
DT matching exactly the kernel version, as long as it does not violate
any bindings.

> However, there is a coming issue with Android project Treble which
> does say all board specifics are an overlay (or multiple overlays) to
> a common SoC base dtb which does make the split an ABI. For mainline
> to handle this, we'd need to start making the board files overlays.

That does not sound good ...

> And to not break everything, we'd need to apply those overlays at
> build time to produce a single board dtb. OTOH, phones aren't really
> supported in mainline and vendors will do it wrong before mainline
> gets around to it.
> 
>> This could be used as a template for creating specific board DTs.
>> Ideally vendors could put those on their boards: into some flash or
>> integrated into the firmware (as part of U-Boot, for instance).
> 
> That's really a separate problem from where are dts files maintained.
> 
> Does u-boot support using the same dtb to configure itself and to pass
> to the kernel yet? That was a foreign concept though I think it was
> being worked on.

That works already for some platforms or SoCs, as long as someone cares
to keep the U-Boot copy up-to-date with the kernel version [1].
I boot the Pine64 with $fdtcontroladdr (which points to U-Boot's .dtb)
these days, without the need to load any .dtb. And on some boards U-Boot
lives in SPI flash, so the .dtb is really tied to the board. Like on
Highbank/Midway ;-)

Also this is the default address which the bootuefi command takes when
there is nothing more specific provided.

But this is purely platform specific, and for some of them the DT used
in U-Boot is quite different from the kernel version. Although this can
be fixed, as the U-Boot drivers can be changed and don't adhere to some ABI.

>> And having a source for the .dtsi should make it easier to get a
>> readable de-compilation of a given .dtb.
> 
> If such a tool existed to add back the annotations. YAML will solve
> that, I'm sure.

Yes, but you need some extra JSON to recover the formatting ;-)

>> We could collect .dts files for boards somewhere else. It's already the
>> case that we have some boards with a specific SoC "supported by the
>> kernel" and some not, for no technical reason at all, actually. It's
>> just whether there is someone willing to post (and push through) a .dts
>> file.
> 
> We could start accepting (but not requiring) patches against the
> devicetree-rebasing.git tree if that solves the problem of "kernel
> bindings" and "kernel dts files". We can mechanically convert their
> paths back to kernel paths and apply them. I've got no issue signing
> up to that because I fully expect that to be only a trickle.

But that would mean that they would still live in the kernel, right?

Cheers,
Andre.

[1]
http://git.denx.de/?p=u-boot.git;a=commit;h=f98852bfa9a99d7258eb06e4849e5c3d075f44cf
> 
> Rob
> 


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