[Ksummit-2013-discuss] ARM topic: Is DT on ARM the solution, or is there something better?

[Peter Maydell]

On 22 October 2013 18:42, Nicolas Pitre <nicolas.pitre at linaro.org> wrote:
> Having "stable" DT bindings is just a dream.  Experience so far is
> showing that this is neither practical nor realistic.
>
> The unstructured free-for-all approach isn't good either.  Some
> compromise between the two extremes needs to be found.

While I entirely agree that the concept of DT bindings as stable
ABI is a complete pipe dream, it would be nice if we could have
some suitably restricted parts of it that are defined as stable,
for the benefit of tools like kvmtool and QEMU which construct
device tree blobs from scratch to describe the virtual machine
environment. (That means roughly CPUs, RAM, virtio-mmio
devices and a UART at least.)

As the person who has to maintain the device-tree-writing
code for ARM QEMU, I'd actually trust a carefully limited
guarantee of ABI stability for specific bindings much more
than I do the current airy promises that everything is stable.

thanks
-- PMM