Is hardware board required if hope to upstream a new arm/arm64 soc?

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 9:47 AM Li Chen <lchen at ambarella.com> wrote:
>
> Hi, all
>
> I wonder if a soc design vendor try to get their new socs upstreamed, do
> maintainers need to get hardware/boards from vendors to verify bootable
> or other issues?

Hi Li,

I found your old email today after I saw your recent kernel patches.

To answer your original question: there is no requirement to have hardware
available anywhere, in fact I have very little hardware from any of the
platforms.

The deal is that upstream maintainers care about long-term maintainability,
I want to make sure that adding a new platform does not make it harder
for other developers to do tree-wide changes that require modifications
to each platform, to avoid regressions.

Whether the code works correctly in the first place is up to the
downstream maintainer who submits the code. If you want to add
a new platform, I expect you to test the code.

On the other hand, if you want to integrate a platform into automated
test setups, the kernelci.org team is usually happy to either add
boards into their fully automated labs, or to link up to third-party
labs that are able to run kernels built by kernelci.

Let me know if you have any other questions about upstreaming,
I would very much like to see ambarella SoCs get supported by
the kernel.

      Arnd