Re: [RFC PATCH 2/2] iio: st-accel: Add support for Silan SC7A20 and SC7A30E

From: Andy Shevchenko <andy.shevchenko@gmail.com>
To: Daniel Palmer <daniel@0x0f.com>
Cc: Denis CIOCCA <denis.ciocca@st.com>,
	Jonathan Cameron <jic23@kernel.org>,
	linux-iio <linux-iio@vger.kernel.org>,
	Mario TESI <mario.tesi@st.com>,
	Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 2/2] iio: st-accel: Add support for Silan SC7A20 and SC7A30E
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2020 15:56:27 +0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAHp75VeAbbqVOTeCheZ5r+LhQ7O+AD=UyduQ3iCcx80EciZ8RQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAFr9PXkNBunBhrfyrYn1nU=hSw9A2n_fVSSH6HMAtEQ7+MnBdw@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Aug 20, 2020 at 3:27 PM Daniel Palmer <daniel@0x0f.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Aug 2020 at 03:19, Denis CIOCCA <denis.ciocca@st.com> wrote:
>
> > I strongly disagree that these parts will be supported by STMicroelectronics driver.
>
> The alternative seems to be write a totally new driver that does
> exactly the same thing, use a lot of people's time to get it ready to
> go into the kernel etc when we could come up with a way to allow the
> driver to accept a different WAI register value in a non-intrusive way
> that can go in the bin at a later date if it turns out supporting
> these chips is too much hassle.

Which is fine with me, I mean adding an ID is a common practice for
competing hardware clones.

> > We DO NOT want to find out one day that we need to modify our structure in order to support competition.
>
> I think Jonathan suggested adding me as a reviewer for these parts
> thus making me responsible for them.
> I'm fine with that. If it comes to the point where the driver changes
> so much that it's not possible to keep them working then you'd have my
> blessing to just remove support for them.

I encourage you to do this. I guess it's much better if we have
someone, than orphaned code in the kernel.

> That said I'm not going to force this on anyone.
> This patch was a spin-off of a personal project to try to make cheap
> Linux capable SoCs available to makers[0].

And again full support from me here.

It's a really very strange position of STMicro here. I as a maintainer
/ reviewer / supporter of a lot of hardware have a good example of
collaboration with contributors from other companies when they do
improve our drivers. And I have been doing the same for others, for
example Synopsys DesignWare SATA driver which had been found on PPC44x
platform.

> One of the devices I used
> to reverse engineer that hardware had one of these Silan parts, I
> noticed the registers looked exactly the same as ST parts supported in
> the kernel already and upon testing they worked so I thought it was
> worth throwing this out there. If you guys don't want to deal with it
> I'll just leave it in my tree.

> [0] - https://github.com/breadbee/breadbee

-- 
With Best Regards,
Andy Shevchenko