From: Simon Glass sjg@chromium.org Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2021 12:23:21 -0600
Hi François,
On Wed, 27 Oct 2021 at 09:14, François Ozog francois.ozog@linaro.org wrote:
On Wed, 27 Oct 2021 at 16:08, Simon Glass sjg@chromium.org wrote:
Hi François,
On Tue, 26 Oct 2021 at 00:07, François Ozog francois.ozog@linaro.org wrote:
Hi Simon
Position unchanged on this series: adding fake dts for boards that generate their device tree in the dts directory is not good. If you have them in documentation the it is acceptable.
I think we are going to have to disagree on this one. I actually used the qemu one in testing/development recently. We have to have a way to develop in-tree with U-Boot. It does not impinge on any of your use cases, so far as I know.
I am not the only one in disagreement... You just saw Alex Bénée from Qemu saying the same thing. I understand the advanced debug/development scenario you mention. But locating the DT files in the dts directory is mis-leading the contributors to think that they need to compile the DT for the targeted platforms. For your advanced scenario, you can still have the dts in the documentation area, or whatever directory (except dts). compile it and supply to U-Boot.
We have this situation with rpi 1, 2 and 3 and I don't believe anyone has noticed. U-Boot handles the build automatically. If you turn off OF_BOARD, it will use the U-Boot devicetree always so you know what is going on.
Until. The Raspberry Pi foundation releases a new firmware that configures the hardware differently such that the addresses in the U-Boot devicetree are wrong and nothing works anymore. Can't speak for the rpi 1, but this has happened in the past for the rpi 2 and 3 as well as more recently on the rpi 4.
We can add a message to U-Boot indicating where the devicetree came from, perhaps? That might be useful given everything that is going on.
As in this case, quite often in these discussions I struggle to understand what is behind the objection. Is it that your customers are demanding that devicetrees become private, secret data, not included in open-source projects? Or is it just the strange case of QEMU that is informing your thinking? I know of at least one project where the first-stage bootloader produces a devicetree and no one has the source for it. I believe TF-A was created for licensing reasons...so can you be a bit clearer about what the problem actually is? If a board is in-tree in U-Boot I would like it to have a devicetree there, at least until we have a better option. At the very least, it MUST be discoverable and it must be possible to undertake U-Boot development easily without a lot of messing around.
How many people are there out there that work on U-Boot that don't have a Linux source tree checked out? Even I have several of those lying around on my development systems and I am an OpenBSD developer ;).