[Linaro-acpi] [PATCH v5 18/18] Documentation: ACPI for ARM64

[Catalin Marinas]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2015 at 01:59:27PM +0000, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Tuesday 06 January 2015 11:20:01 Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 08:16:30PM +0000, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > > On Monday 05 January 2015 13:13:02 Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > > > > since passing no DT tables to OS but
> > > > > acpi=force is missing is a corner case, we can do a follow up patch to
> > > > > fix that, does it make sense?
> > > > 
> > > > Not entirely. Why would no dtb and no acpi=force be a corner case? I
> > > > thought this should be the default when only ACPI tables are passed, no
> > > > need for an additional acpi=force argument.
> > > 
> > > We don't really support the case of only ACPI tables for now. The expectation
> > > is that you always have working DT support, at least for the next few years
> > > as ACPI features are ramping up, and without acpi=force it should not try
> > > to use ACPI at all.
> > 
> > So if both DT and ACPI are present, just use DT unless acpi=force is
> > passed. So far I think we agree but what I want to avoid is always
> > mandating acpi=force even when the DT tables are missing (in the long
> > run).
> > 
> > Now, what's preventing a vendor firmware from providing only ACPI
> > tables? Do we enforce it in some way (arm-acpi.txt, kernel warning etc.)
> > that both DT and ACPI are supported, or at least that dts files are
> > merged in the kernel first?
> 
> We have no way of enforcing what a board vendor ships, so if they want
> to have ACPI-only machines for MS Windows, they just won't work by
> default on Linux.

What do you mean by "won't work by default on Linux"? Assuming no
additional drivers are needed (i.e. a few devices mentioned in SBSA and
the rest on a PCIe bus, using existing drivers without further
modifications), do you still want mainline to fail to boot on such
ACPI-only systems?

> Once ACPI support is mature enough, we can also have a whitelist or a
> different default for using it automatically when no DT is present.

Having a white-list requires some for of SoC identification. Does ACPI
provide such thing (like "model" or "compatible" strings in the top DT
node)?

> For drivers merged upstream, I would insist that every driver merged
> for an ARM64 platform has a documented DT binding that is used in the
> driver.

That's fine by me. I just hope that for hardware aimed at ACPI we won't
need many non-PCIe drivers.

-- 
Catalin