Hello All, On Tue, Dec 05, 2017 at 10:47:12PM +0100, Karsten Merker wrote: > > Please don't ship dtb files at all, including the kernel images. ... > it appears to me that this argument assumes a situation that we > simply don't have for many devices. A lot of the ARM-based > devices that Debian supports don't come with any preinstalled > firmware at all. Many of them don't even have permanent onboard > storage (such as an SPI NOR flash) in which such a firmware could > be stored, so the firmware is commonly a user-supplied u-boot > image on an SD card. > > In practice, for most of the devices supported by Debian/armhf, > the canonical source for the devicetree _is_ the Linux kernel. > The SoC-manufacturers commonly ship years-old, often > pre-devicetree android kernels and stone-aged hacked-up u-boot > versions without any notion of device-tree for their hardware and > don't really care about mainline Linux. ... +1
And additionally fiddling with devicetree should be encouraged IMHO as it allows to do unusual things with those SoC boards, eg. sharing an IR RX with an UART TX - how should the vendor decide in such cases ? Also look at the ACPI situation - even main Server vendors firmware contains bugs not fixed during the livetime of the systems. So please let the linux kernel tree be the device-tree reference. Thanks for all the work on device-tree, greetings Hermann -- Netzwerkadministration/Zentrale Dienste, Interdiziplinaeres Zentrum fuer wissenschaftliches Rechnen der Universitaet Heidelberg IWR; INF 205; 69120 Heidelberg; Tel: (06221)54-14405 Fax: -14427 Email: hermann.la...@iwr.uni-heidelberg.de