Subject: Re: [PATCH] powerpc: remove default=y from PMAC and CHRP Kconfigs

From: Scott Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2008 12:08:45 -0500

Matt Sealey wrote:
>> CHRP and PMAC aren't following the rules that everyone else is 
>> following.  Why?
> 
> Because they are by far the historically most common configuration, and
> still in production as the defacto standard PowerPC system configuration.

So you could make an argument for it being turned on in 
arch/powerpc/defconfig, if we had one.  That doesn't mean it should be 
"default y".

> IBM blades etc. with SLOF will boot up as a CHRP-ish system, as well as the
> Efika and Pegasos and anything else Genesi produces. Since Linux 
> distributions
> generally do not support tiny embedded boards,

What do distributions have to do with it?  It's harder for distributions 
to set the options they want than for embedded developers?

> you can imagine why it's
> disabled by default, but there's no reason it can't be ENABLED by default
> and turned off by a distribution, the same way it can't be enabled by
> default and turned off by YOU (compare and contrast having to manually
> select which board you want to build for every time).

Likewise there's no reason that PMAC/CHRP can't be DISABLED by default, 
and turned on by YOU.

> But, turning them all on would not matter. You would build a kernel for
> every one and a device tree for every one increasing your build time a
> bit for a default kernel,

s/a bit/a lot/

> but you would be guaranteed to get a kernel
> binary somewhere in the tree that would work on all of them :)

Really?  Who do I go to for this guarantee, when there's no support for 
the hardware I'm trying to get to work? :-)

-Scott