Subject: Re: removing get_immrbase()??

From: Timur Tabi <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:46:01 -0500

Kumar Gala wrote:

> The specific issue I'm talking about is the addition of new nodes that  
> might break old device trees. 

New nodes or new properties?  The CPM nodes are not new.  On some device
trees, the original versions did not have a compatible property for the
CPM nodes (e.g. commit 0b5cf10691eb2c95a9126bf25f5e084d83d5d743).
Therefore, there are device trees out there that are missing some property.

Like I said earlier, if you can demonstrate that *all* of these device
tree would be broken with the latest kernel anyway, then we don't need
to worry about backwards compatibility.

I'm tired of debugging customer issues where the kernel is updated but
the firmware and device tree aren't.  IMHO, Kernel developers are
generally too lax when it comes to firmware and device tree backwards
compatibility, and I think that's wrong.

-- 
Timur Tabi
Linux kernel developer at Freescale