ARM, SoC: About the use DT-defined properties by 3rd-party drivers

Hi Mark,

On 09/13/2016 05:47 PM, Mark Rutland wrote:

quoted

quoted

If you believe that the bindings don't matter, then there is absolutely
no reason for them to exist in the first place.

If those binding matter to *anyone*, then those collating the bindings
have some responsibility of stewardship, and that includes
review/maintenance/etc.

The thing is that right now it seems the "responsibility of stewardship"
lies only within "Linux", whereas DT is proposed as open for everybody,
Bootloaders, FreeBSD, etc.

In that case, shouldn't the "responsibility" be shared?

Ideally, yes.

Which is one of the reasons devicetree.org was set up as a common forum
for projects to collaborate on devicetree.

I see, what about using different 'sections' on a DT to allow different
parties be responsible for their 'section'?

- 'generic' sections (i.e.: those using bindings used by Linux drivers)
would be under stewardship of Linux.

- 'specific' sections (i.e.: my example, bindings *not used by Linux*, but
they could be bindings for other OSs as you said) would be under a
different stewardship.

DT seems essentially free-form, like XML.
One could imagine that some tool could then be used to guarantee that
some parts of DT conform to a given XML schema, including backwards
compatibility, while at the same time ignoring 'staging'/'specific' stuff.

NOTE: this appears to be possible using 'overlays' as Warner suggested, but
in that case not all parts are public, which limits public information.

Best regards,

Sebastian