On Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 03:19:52PM +0200, Frieder Schrempf wrote:

> I would have expected that there is some kind of existing userspace API to
> load an overlay manually, but it seems like there isn't!?

> So what's the reasoning behind this? How can I solve this in a
> mainline-compliant way, meaning without either keeping downstream patches to
> bind spidev to my device or writing and maintaining code that does the
> overlay loading?

Basically the reasoning is that nobody's done it rather than any grand
design not to do it.  There's some issues for more complex connectors
present on multiple boards with mapping the same connector onto multiple
boards where a resource on the connector might be provided by different
things on the base board so it's not quite as trivial for them as it
should be.