[OpenWrt-Devel] [PATCHv2] Linux 3.16 support on mvebu

[Rafał Miłecki]

On 28 October 2014 16:59, Maxime Ripard
<maxime.ripard at free-electrons.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 04:29:15PM +0100, Rafał Miłecki wrote:
>> On 9 October 2014 17:10, Maxime Ripard <maxime.ripard at free-electrons.com> wrote:
>> > This is the second version of my rather big changes to support the
>> > 3.16 kernel, and more specifically on the mvebu SoCs.
>> >
>> > The first patch ports the existing 3.14 patches to 3.16, and creates a
>> > generic configuration for it.
>> >
>> > http://free-electrons.com/~maxime/pub/openwrt-3.16/v2-0001-linux-Add-3.16-support.patch
>>
>> A kind of problem with 3.16 was its support as it wasn't picked for
>> LTS by anyone.
>>
>> So personally I'd prefer to use another kernel version for OpenWrt
>> release. A one with LTS would be great. Recently we've started working
>> on 3.18, which is probably the nearest kernel with a chance of LTS.
>> And it case it won't be LTS, personally I'd look for another one.
>
> I wasn't aware of such policy. Is there a reason for 3.13 for example
> to be supported then?

It's what some ppl prefer, maybe even more since the AA release. 10.04
was based on 3.3 which caused some problems.
I don't really know about 3.13. My personal great wish is to kill 3.3,
3.8 and 3.13 ASAP in OpenWrt.


>> > The second patch does pretty much the same thing but for the mvebu
>> > target.
>>
>> Would it be possible for you to switch to 3.18? It's still not ready
>> (not compiling) as it was started just yesterday. But I think we will
>> try to stabilize this one.
>
> I needed a kernel >= 3.16, so 3.18 is fine for me. I can of course
> help to bring it up, and I'll be happy to, but if there's a chance for
> my work to actually help and be merged.
>
> So far, I sent three change sets:
>   - One that, as I just discovered, has been silently merged. I guess
>     it's ok.
>   - One to upgrade to 3.16, which will apparently not get merged,
>     because some private (as in !public) effort as been going on and
>     just appeared out of nowhere on the git repo, without any posting
>     or reviews. I didn't receive any mail warning me of that effort,
>     or why my work was considered pointless, before yours, three weeks
>     later.
>   - One to fix real issues that were preventing *any* openwrt image to
>     be flashed, let alone work, on one officially "supported"
>     device. This one being the most critical only got two reviews,
>     that were just basically saying "meh. I don't like it", but never
>     got any suggestions on how to actually fix things the right way.
>
> I'm not trying to force my way in, I'm really not, I'd be really happy
> to improve my patches so that these bugs end up being fixed
> upstream. But there need to be some discussion, and guidance probably,
> for that, and so far there's been none.
>
> These were my first contributions to OpenWRT, and I can't really say
> I've been pleased with the experience so far.

I can't really say why your work wasn't properly reviewed/accepted.
Adding new kernel is always a big task to do & to review. I guess
noone got time to spend few hours checking your 3.16 patches :( And
it's really complex for one developer to handle all subsystem changes.
I also don't see a good solution for that.

1) Someone spends hours working on new kernel support silently
Result: people complaining because of non-public & slow work.

2) Someone tries to work on new kernel in a public way
Result: people complaining it's not working out-of-box, see:
https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/18236

I didn't really spend hours working on 3.18 in some non-public way. I
just ported most patches in ~2 hours and pushed what I got. Now I need
help on cleaning that up.

I'm also not sure about other of your patches. My only guess I ppl
didn't focus on them since there wasn't 3.16 in the first place. Or
maybe you could send separated patch per patch?

Luka: any comments / preferences about this?

-- 
Rafał
_______________________________________________
openwrt-devel mailing list
openwrt-devel at lists.openwrt.org
https://lists.openwrt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel