[GIT PULL 0/3] ARM: SoC: Second round of changes for v3.12

[Linus Torvalds]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 8:43 AM, Stephen Warren <swarren at wwwdotorg.org> wrote:
>
> x86 PCs likely have at least some of this exact same HW, e.g. I2C-based
> LM90 thermal sensors. However, I /think/ this all gets hidden from the
> OS by ACPI or other firmware mechanisms. Do you prefer firmware
> abstraction over DT?

If there was a standard one, I would actually prefer it. Just not the
insanity of ACPI with pseudo-executable code, just plain read-only
tables. The fact that there isn't any unification in the ARM market
makes bad design decisions _worse_.

So yes, the same mess exists on PC's too (sound in particular tends to
be a morass of just basically crazy "this is wired up so-and-so"), but
on PCs you end up having the advantage of (a) more stuff is
discoverable and (b) a long-time standard platform so the stuff that
isn't is much less bad. ARM doesn't have that (and it's basically
impossible to create a standard in that space), and as a result
absolutely _everything_ is one-off, which just exacerbates the
problem.

               Linus