Date:   Tue, 1 Feb 2022 11:08:38 -0800
From:   Jakub Kicinski <kuba@...nel.org>
To:     Serge Semin <Sergey.Semin@...kalelectronics.ru>
Cc:     Alexey Sheplyakov <asheplyakov@...ealt.ru>,
        <netdev@...r.kernel.org>,
        Giuseppe Cavallaro <peppe.cavallaro@...com>,
        Alexandre Torgue <alexandre.torgue@...s.st.com>,
        Jose Abreu <joabreu@...opsys.com>,
        Alexey Malahov <Alexey.Malahov@...kalelectronics.ru>,
        Pavel Parkhomenko <Pavel.Parkhomenko@...kalelectronics.ru>,
        Evgeny Sinelnikov <sin@...ealt.ru>,
        Serge Semin <fancer.lancer@...il.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] net: stmmac: added Baikal-T1/M SoCs glue layer

On Tue, 1 Feb 2022 18:54:39 +0300 Serge Semin wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 12:27:18PM -0800, Jakub Kicinski wrote:
> > On Fri, 28 Jan 2022 22:55:09 +0400 Alexey Sheplyakov wrote:  
> > > In general quite a number of Linux drivers (GPUs, WiFi chips, foreign
> > > filesystems, you name it) provide a limited support for the corresponding
> > > hardware (filesystem, protocol, etc) and don't cover all peculiarities.
> > > Yet having such a limited support in the mainline kernel is much more
> > > useful than no support at all (or having to use out-of-tree drivers,
> > > obosolete vendor kernels, binary blobs, etc).
> > > 
> > > Therefore "does not cover all peculiarities" does not sound like a valid
> > > reason for rejecting this driver. That said it's definitely up to stmmac
> > > maintainers to decide if the code meets the quality standards, does not
> > > cause excessive maintanence burden, etc.  
> > 
> > Sounds sensible, Serge please take a look at the v2 and let us know if
> > there are any bugs in there. Or any differences in DT bindings or user
> > visible behaviors with what you're planning to do. If the driver is
> > functional and useful it can evolve and gain support for features and
> > platforms over time.  
> 
> I've already posted my comments in this thread regarding the main
> problematic issues of the driver, but Alexey for some reason ignored
> them (dropped from his reply). Do you want me to copy my comments to
> v2 and to proceed with review there?

Right, on a closer look there are indeed comments you raised that were
not addressed and not constrained to future compatibility. 

Alexey, please take another look at those and provide a changelog in
your next posting so we can easily check what was addressed.

> Regarding the DT-bindings and the user-visible behavior. Right, I'll
> add my comments in this matter. Thanks for suggesting. This was one of
> the problems why I was against the driver integrating into the kernel.
> One of our patchset brings a better organization to the current
> DT-bindings of the Synopsys DW *MAC devices. In particular it splits
> up the generic bindings for the vendor-specific MACs to use and the
> bindings for the pure DW MAC compatible devices. In addition the
> patchset will add the generic Tx/Rx clocks DT-bindings and the
> DT-bindings for the AXI/MTL nodes. All of that and the rest of our
> work will be posted a bit later as a set of the incremental patchsets
> with small changes, one by one, for an easier review. We just need
> some more time to finish the left of the work. The reason why the
> already developed patches hasn't been delivered yet is that the rest
> of the work may cause adding changes into the previous patches. In
> order to decrease a number of the patches to review and present a
> complete work for the community, we decided to post the patchsets
> after the work is fully done.

TBH starting to post stuff is probably best choice you can make,
for example the DT rework you mention sounds like a refactoring 
you can perform without posting any Baikal support.

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