Re: [PATCH] maintainership update for the Marvell Orion family of SOCs

On Tuesday 01 May 2012, Andrew Lunn wrote:

quoted

Well, there is no reason to rush this at all, it could live in parallel
for a couple of years. But at one point we can decide that if nobody has
bothered to write the .dts file for one board and tested it that nobody
cares about that board any more and it can just get removed and possibly
added back in dts form when someone does complain.

Probably a FAQ, but maybe somebody can point me in the right
direction. How will Debian, Ubuntu, etc, deal with old machines who's
u-boot does not support DT, yet the kernel has moved on and only has
DT support for a board? Will the kernel install process need to
determine what board the machine is and append the DT to the end of
the kernel?

I think that is the most likely scenario. Another option would be
to provide a replacement or second-stage boot loader that actually
understands DT and that gets loaded instead of the kernel by the
first-stage boot loader.

Or do we envisage a process where all DT are appended to
the kernel, and the machine ID, as passed by the old uboot, is used to
pick the correct DT?

This has been discussed in the past, but IIRC we decided against putting
that logic into the kernel. Folks on devicetree-discuss@l.o.o might remember
the details better than me.

	Arnd