* Russell King - ARM Linux <li...@arm.linux.org.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 10:06:34AM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > Having strong, effective platform abstractions inside the kernel really
> > helps
> > even if the hardware space itself is inevitably fragmented: both powerpc
> > and
> > x86 has shown that. Until you realize and appreciate that you really have
> > not
> > understood the problem i think.
>
> No, I think it is the other way around. Folk like me and Nicolas over the
> last ten years have put considerable amounts of effort into trying to keep
> the ARM support code as clean and maintainable as possible.
Absolutely no argument about that, whenever i have read core ARM code it was
always a pleasure. You guys are doing a fine job there.
What i argued with was what Nicolas said:
> > > back in the early days of the PCs, different systems from different
> > > vendors had different bus types, peripherals at different addresses,
> > > etc. that didn't make all of those vendors systems different
> > > architectures, instead those things were varients of the x86
> > > architecture.
> >
> > Most of them didn't survive. That really helps.
It does not matter whether hardware survives or not - most pieces of hardware
do not survive. What matters is whether the inevitable hardware-churn is
allowed to litter the kernel tree with unmaintainable pieces of crap.
You even mention that it's not maintainable to you:
> That is true of the common ARM stuff, but there's no way we can do this for
> all SoC support - there aren't the hours in the day to provide such a wide
> oversight. [...]
The problem is the solution:
> That's why we have SoC maintainers, and the SoC maintainers have the
> responsibility to sort out their own sub-trees.
... which sets the wolves to mind the sheep, so to say. Self-oversight never
worked very well (unless you believe in perpetual bank bailouts).
So Linus and Thomas (with the genirq hat on) are pushing back, because both of
them feel affected negatively by crap.
"All is fine" or "it's just natural" do not seem like the right answers to
those concerns.
Thanks,
Ingo
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-omap" in
the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
