On Thursday 18 October 2012 09:58:11 Simon Horman wrote:

On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 01:42:29PM +0000, Arnd Bergmann wrote:

quoted

On Wednesday 17 October 2012, Simon Horman wrote:

quoted

Hi Olof, Hi Arnd,

please consider the following defconfig enhancements for 3.8.

These look good to me, but I wonder what happened to the plan to reduce
the number of defconfig files we discussed before. Since you can build
a combined kernel that runs on all (or most) of the supported boards,
can you add a combined shmobile_defconfig that is able to work on
a wide variety of hardware and drop some of the less common defconfig
files?

Most of the modern platforms nowadays have just one defconfig that
covers everything.

Hi Arnd,

I wonder if such consolidation only makes sense for boards that
make use of DT. If so, I can see that we may be able to come
up with a single configuration for the Armadillo800eva, KZM9G
and KZM9D boards. But not for older boards such as the Mackerel which
have not been converted to use DT.

Usually you should just be able to enable any boards together,
independent of whether they are using DT or not. It's possible
that shmobile does something different from the other platforms
that I'm not aware of, of course. If you look at e.g.
omap2plus_defconfig or imx_v6_v7_defconfig, they both enable
all the available boards.

I am also wondering if more of the drivers that SH Mobile uses need to
become DT aware before a consolidated configuration can work.  In
particular, I am thinking about the SCI serial driver and the location of
the serial port that can be used for serial console and early printk - this
features in the kernel command line of the per-board defconfigs and is
relied on by developers.

Device drivers that don't use DT should get their configuration from
platform_data. The command line can be used to override those, but it's
also normally passed by the boot loader, which also has to configure
e.g. how much memory is present or which uart to use.

	Arnd