Should we merge arch/riscv/boot/dts via the SOC tree?

[Krzysztof Kozlowski]

On 07/11/2022 17:46, Palmer Dabbelt wrote:
> This has come up a bunch of times, but I don't think we've ever really
> made a decision.  Historically that's not been such a big deal because
> the RISC-V device trees were pretty inactive, but that's changed -- both
> because Conor has been cleaning everything up, and also because there's
> a bunch of SOCs showing up with RISC-V cores in them.  We talked about
> this again at plumbers a few times, but Arnd wasn't around it person so
> I figured it's best to just start an email thread and see how people
> feel.
> 
> A lot of these new SOCs are based on Arm designs and the device trees
> very much reflect that, so it makes sense to me to just keep the device
> tree merges via as similar a path as possible.  

Recent Renesas r9a07g043 (sharing between arm64 and riscv) is example of
that. If changes to them start coming via different trees, we might have
a lot of conflicts.

> IIUC that happens via
> the SOC tree these days, so it makes sense to me that we start handling
> the RISC-V device trees that way as well.  That would make things easier
> for contributors, as they'll have one workflow for all their SOCs, but
> also easier for me as a lot of this SOC stuff touches bits I really
> don't understand and thus get kind of lost trying to review.
> 
> Arnd: looks like you're handling most of the merges these days so this
> would be increasing your workload.  I feel kind of bad just dumping a
> bunch of stuff on you, but I think at least now the RISC-V DTS are in
> reasonable shape so hopefully it's not that bad.  It'd certainly help
> things on my end, and I'm happy to try and re-direct some of that saved
> time to helping out in SOC land but I'm not sure how well that'd work
> out in practice as I'm pretty buried.
> 
> On a somewhat related note, Conor has offered to pick up the otherwise
> unmaintained RISC-V SOCs.  That's sort of its own discussion, but if we
> change over to the SOC tree we might as well just do everything at the
> same time.
> 

On the other hand MIPS DTS is not coming via SoC tree, so there is no
yet such wide approach.

Best regards,
Krzysztof