[Ksummit-2012-discuss] [ATTEND] Process issues, device model, stable

[Mark Brown]

I'd like to attend kernel summit this year.  I can bring some fairly
broad based embedded experience as both a contributor and a maintainer,
mostly from bits of the system off the main SoC.  I can also offer the
perspective of a chip vendor in the consumer electronics space, covering
things like our experiences with upstream and also the experience of
working with our direct users, both in terms of their needs and in terms
of advocating upstream approaches to them.

The main issues that I care about are:

 - General process and tooling issues, especially around the things that
   come up in the embedded area where there's a bunch of things like
   like lots of cross tree dependencies which seem to be driving new
   processes like the arm-soc ones with dependency branches.  Do we want
   to roll these things out more broadly?

   There are (as ever) a bunch of pain points at all levels, not that
   I've got any particularly bright ideas about most of them.

 - Dealing with mapping actual hardware interrelationships onto the
   device model, deferred probing covers a lot of the current pain
   points but there's other issues like bus bandwith management coming
   up and I've been noticing that different arches and SoCs have been
   taking slightly different approaches to how they use some of the
   generic APIs like runtime PM.

 - Stable kernel releases, mostly in the same areas as everyone else
   has been mentinoning though with a different set of distributions and
   users in mind to most.

   I do keep wondering if it's worth providing a way to flag up
   non-bugfix backports to distros and other people maintaining older
   kernels.  I relatively often find myself with fixes that definitely
   don't meet the stable kernel critera but which realistically I'd
   expect anyone deploying with older kernels to want to grab along with
   their hardware enablement stuff (which is a separate issue).  I think
   this might be part of why people aren't bothering so much as they
   might with tagging things for stable.