Thread (67 messages) 67 messages, 17 authors, 2010-06-25

Heads up: Linus plans to kill ARM defconfigs

From: marek.vasut@gmail.com (Marek Vasut)
Date: 2010-06-04 01:50:36

Dne P? 4. ?ervna 2010 03:37:10 Marek Vasut napsal(a):
Dne P? 4. ?ervna 2010 03:35:28 Eric Miao napsal(a):
quoted
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 9:16 AM, Ryan Mallon [off-list ref] wrote:
quoted
Marek Vasut wrote:
quoted
Dne P? 4. ?ervna 2010 01:33:35 Ryan Mallon napsal(a):
quoted
Nicolas Pitre wrote:
quoted
On Fri, 4 Jun 2010, Ryan Mallon wrote:
quoted
Is it worth being a bit proactive and getting rid of some of them
in advance? Things like spear3[012]0_defconfig are basically
identically except for the board type. Combining all three of
those would remove 1500 lines of code.
Please go ahead with a patch.
Hmm, not as easy as I thought. The three boards cannot be built into
a single kernel since the arch/arm/mach-spear3xx/spear3[012]0.c
files all extern a bunch of structs which have naming conflicts.

It does look possible to rewrite that code so that all three boards
can be built into a single kernel. I can try and put together a
patch, but I don't have any hardware to test with.

The at91 is actually in a similar state, where only one of the
at91sam9260, at91sam9g45, etc can be selected. Again, it should be
possible to rework the code so that most of the different cpus can be
built into a single kernel. I'm sure other mach's are in a simliar
state. Fixing these where possible would allow us to have single
defconfigs per mach directory and reduce code churn, which is what
Linus is really complaining about.
I just tested, PXA (mach-pxa) probably can be compiled into single
kernel supporting all the boards.
Yes, IIRC Russell and Eric did a huge amount of work to get pxa into
that state.

ryan at okiwi:configs$ grep "ARCH_PXA=y" * | wc -l
25

Can we remove/combine some of those?
Definitely. In the end of the day, I would like to see pxa_defconfig
only. But at the moment, I need every board maintainer to review their
defconfig and combine them as much as possible. E.g.

palmte_defconfig   palmtt_defconfig   palmz71_defconfig 
palmz72_defconfig
OMAP: palmte_defconfig, palmtt_defconfig, palmz71_defconfig
PXA: palmz72_defconfig ... the rest of palmxx_defconfig

Sorry about the confusion
This is OMAP stuff, not PXA. But yeah, these could be combined. I don't
have these devices available at the moment (and it might be a problem
getting them into operational state).
quoted
I'd guess can simply combine into one. (Marek, feel free to do it)

I'd more like a step to step work instead of a brutely removal of all
defconfig, not sure if Linus is going to buy in.

For those sub-arch which cannot simply compile a single kernel for
multiple boards, s5p* as previously mentioned, I suggest not to
introduce any new defconfig until the problem is solved.

Also, we are now working on a single kernel for multiple sub-arch (at
least what Nicolas and I am doing now, and welcome to join us). It's
tough (the way to handle different phys_offset is only the tip of the
iceberg) and seems now more and more necessary. so hopefully by the end
of the day, we may possible end up with only very few defconfig.
How long is your day now ?
Keyboard shortcuts
hback out one level
jnext message in thread
kprevious message in thread
ldrill in
Escclose help / fold thread tree
?toggle this help