Re: [PATCH 0/9] Doc/DT: DT bindings for various display components

On 28/02/14 18:27, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:

On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 02:20:07PM +0200, Tomi Valkeinen wrote:

quoted

Shortly about the display components in the series, in the order of probable
public interest:

* Analog TV, DVI and HDMI Connectors represent a respective connector on the
  board. They don't do much, but they do mark the end of the video pipeline (from
  the board's pov), and they should also in the future offer ways to handle
  things like the +5V pin on DVI and HDMI connector and HPD pin.

The big thing which concerns me is that we're using very generic
compatible strings here - has anyone done any searches to see whether
there are any existing standards for this kind of stuff already?

I did look for any display related DT bindings when I started the work
on OMAP DSS DT bindings. I didn't really find any. If I recall right,
the only thing I found was an example of basically:

fb@1234567 {
	compatible="asd";
	reg=<1234567>;
};

So just a node for "framebuffer", with the register addresses. And maybe
video timings in some form.

Maybe I didn't know where to look.

Even if none can be found, if we're going to create something like
this, it should probably become a public standard not just for Linux.

This is totally unclear to me. How does it become a public standard?
What's the forum for this?

If we're not willing to do that, I'd suggest prefixing the compatible
strings with "linux," as a "company" identifier so that there's no
chance that we may hit some major problem caused by a conflicting
implementation in the future.

I don't have an issue with "linux," either. We could always later remove
the prefix (but keep drivers compatible with it). So it sounds quite a
safe approach to me, if we're not quite clear if these bindings are
acceptable, or how to get "public approval" for them.

 Tomi