On Wed, Dec 06, 2017 at 12:49:39PM -0600, Andrew F. Davis wrote:
On 12/06/2017 12:42 PM, Mark Brown wrote:
We need to preserve old bindings to ensure DT compatiblity, the easiest way to do that is to keep old machine drivers around. There are plenty of older drivers that wouldn't be accepted now but would at least need replacing with a compatibility layer that adapts the bindings onto one of the generic drivers. That adaption layer would definitely be useful (basically a big table of platform data) but it'd take time to implement it.
We then should at least start depreciating them now so that someday we can drop that stuff. Isolating them would be the first step.
Moving the drivers around is not going to help with that. For users the drivers are not deprecated until someone actually steps up and makes something that allows the generic drivers to handle the old bindings and moves them over, at which point we'd just remove things that have been converted. We can't just tell them not to use something without providing an alternative. For developers they're just going to end up with the simpler machine drivers sitting next to a bunch of machine drivers that reasonably exist which I'm not sure clarifies anything. It's an orthogonal problem.
Wouldn't a few regexps in the MAINTAINERS file cover it? We've already got a bunch of vendors doing this.
pcm* tas* tlv* twl*
It's messy how many prefixes we have :/
Eh, not that bad. And easy enough to do anyway.