Hi Bruce,

On 04/15/2015 06:26 PM, Bruce Ashfield wrote:

On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Nikolay Dimitrov
<picmaster@...> wrote:

Hi Bruce,


On 04/15/2015 04:13 PM, Bruce Ashfield wrote:

On 2015-04-15 08:33 AM, Bach, Pascal wrote:

Hi

Adding oe-core, since that's the right place to have a discussion
like this.

As ARM now also moved to device tree it look like in future we
will have more kernels that are using device tree then ones
that are not.

True, but it has been like this for quite some time now :)

As far as I understand currently the generation of device
trees is controlled via KERNEL_DEVICETREE and is handled in via
an include file recipes-kernel/linux/linux-dtb.inc.

I was thinking about moving this include into a class so it
becomes easier to use. Before I dive into implementing
something I would like some feedback from the community.

The big trick with changing anything like this is compatibility
with existing recipes. Whatever we do, existing recipes and
layers shouldn't be broken .. or if they are broken, there
should be a compelling technical reason to do so.

I have the following variant in mind.

Add the device tree generation to the current kernel.bbclass
(or let kernel.bblcass inherit from a kernel-dtb.bbclass).
This way all kernels would automatically be DT enabled. The
class would check if KERNEL_DEVICETREE is set and generate
device trees based on this information. For boards that don't
have KERNEL_DEVICETREE set the class would do nothing and the
behavior is like before. The advantage I see with this
approach is that the only thing a user needs to do is to set
KERNEL_DEVICETREE in the board and make sure the device trees
are available in the kernel they like to build.

That's pretty much the experience that most users have now, since
there's nearly always a kernel recipe created, that recipe
includes linux-dtb.inc, and sets KERNEL_DEVICETREE.

As far as I understood, Pascal's idea is to remove the need for
user recipes to include linux-dtb.inc, and provide this
functionality via inheritance.

That is obvious. My questions are around "why". There's no big
technical advantage, and if you remove that existing file, you break
existing recipes. Which means you need to leave a stub in place.

So without a technical advantage, it's churn for the sake of churn.

Well, removing redundancy and simplifying users' recipes could be
considered an advantage. Also, as the contents of linux-dtb.inc are
going to be moved to bbclass, the file can be left empty, later
maintainers remove the extra line from all users' recipes in following
commits. I don't see breaking as an option.

Bruce

Everything else happens to build and package the device tree.

Was there something specifically that was causing issues with the
current way of building them ?

Cheers,

Bruce

I appreciate your feedback?

Regards Pascal

Kind regards,
Nikolay