Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1759241Ab1CaTZc (ORCPT ); Thu, 31 Mar 2011 15:25:32 -0400 Received: from relais.videotron.ca ([24.201.245.36]:26095 "EHLO relais.videotron.ca" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1759061Ab1CaTZ3 (ORCPT ); Thu, 31 Mar 2011 15:25:29 -0400 MIME-version: 1.0 Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2011 15:25:27 -0400 (EDT) From: Nicolas Pitre X-X-Sender: nico@xanadu.home To: Linus Torvalds Cc: Russell King - ARM Linux , david@lang.hm, Ingo Molnar , Arnd Bergmann , Tony Lindgren , David Brown , lkml , linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org, linux-omap@vger.kernel.org, Catalin Marinas , "H. Peter Anvin" , Thomas Gleixner Subject: Re: [GIT PULL] omap changes for v2.6.39 merge window In-reply-to: Message-id: References: <20110331080634.GA18022@elte.hu> <20110331083044.GB14323@n2100.arm.linux.org.uk> <20110331164539.GB19452@n2100.arm.linux.org.uk> User-Agent: Alpine 2.00 (LFD 1167 2008-08-23) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2557 Lines: 51 On Thu, 31 Mar 2011, Linus Torvalds wrote: > What I'm _not_ seeing is a lot of cross-platform maintenance or sense > of people trying to reign things in and look for solutions to the > proliferation of random stupid and mindless platform code. I do that, Russell does that, Catalin does that, Tony does that, and maybe less than a handful of other important people I'm not listing (sorry). But clearly we are far far from being enough people doing that kind of work. And the fact is that the volume of ARM platform code is steadily being produced at a rate far surpassing X86, and even higher than all the other architectures put together. Linaro is trying to help here, but Linaro cannot conjure the needed experience and knowledge for that kind of work with a magic wand. So we need help! If core kernel people could get off their X86 stool and get down in the ARM mud to help sort out this mess that would be really nice (thanks tglx). Until then all that the few of us can do is to contain the flood and hope for the best, and so far things being as they are have still worked surprisingly well in practice for users. If compensation is a concern then I think Linaro might be able to arrange something. And we can't count on vendor people doing this work. They are all busy porting the kernel to their next SOC version so they can win the next big Android hardware design, and doing so with our kernel quality standards is already quite a struggle for them. What is going on at the moment is some effort to introduce DT support to ARM. The core support is there, but that is useless until platform code is moved to it, and corresponding work is put into bootloaders, etc. That is progressing... slowly. Also there is some work to be able to build a kernel supporting more than one SOC family at once. Of course there is no practical use for a single kernel binary that boots on all existing boards, but moving towards such a goal has beneficial side effects such as good consolidation when possible. But we also need some slack wrt number of lines changed. An increased consolidation effort will create more churn not less, at least for a while. The OMAP clock merge conflict was the result of some cleanup which will make further consolidation easier. Nicolas -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/