[RFC PATCH 0/5] Add smp booting support for Qualcomm ARMv8 SoCs

[Rob Clark]

On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 9:34 AM, Catalin Marinas
<catalin.marinas at arm.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 05:48:48PM -0400, Rob Clark wrote:
>> Just speaking as an outsider to this topic, but seems like most/all
>> tablets/phones/etc ship with signed firmware.  Which means for most of
>> the population, upgrading the firmware to a new version which did
>> support the standard (assuming it existed), isn't really an option on
>> our devices, any more than fixing buggy acpi tables is on our
>> laptops..
>
> I wouldn't expect most population to build their own kernels on
> tablets/phones. And even if you could install a custom kernel, mainline
> rarely runs on such devices because of tons of out of tree patches (just
> look at the Nexus 9 patches that Kumar pointed at; even ignoring the
> booting protocol they are extremely far from an upstreamable form).
>

my point being, that it happens some times.. for example John Stultz's
work on nexus7:

https://plus.google.com/111524780435806926688/posts/DzvpMLmzQiQ

If this had been a year or two in the future and on some 64b
snapdragon, and support for devices with non-PSCI fw is rejected, then
he'd be stuck.

There are folks who are working to get saner, more-upstream kernels
working on devices.. and improving kernel infrastructure for
device-needs (well, in my neck of the woods, there is drm/kms atomic
and dsi/panel framework stuff.. I'm sure other similar things in other
kernel domains).  And it seems like that is a good thing to encourage,
rather than stymie.

BR,
-R

> --
> Catalin