On Mon, Nov 28, 2022 at 02:56:12PM +0100, Jean Delvare wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Nov 2022 12:33:35 +0000, Mark Brown wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 27, 2022 at 07:34:41PM +0100, Jean Delvare wrote:

> > > It is actually better to always build such drivers with OF enabled,
> > > so that the test builds are closer to how each driver will actually be
> > > built on its intended target. Building them without OF may not test
> > > much as the compiler will optimize out potentially large parts of the
> > > code. In the worst case, this could even pop false positive warnings.
> > > Dropping COMPILE_TEST here improves the quality of our testing and
> > > avoids wasting time on non-existent issues.  

> > As ever building without OF does not preclude building with OF.

> I'm sorry, I'm not sure I understand what point you are trying to make
> here.

You're overselling what the change does here in a way that's getting a
bit silly.  It's just cutting down the amount of stuff the randconfig
people do, that's all.  It's not particularly bad to compile without the
DT support, I suppose you could argue that it's preserving our ability
to work with other firmware interfaces although that's a bit of a push
(but then a lot of the stuff generated by randconfig is in a similar
ballpark of course).  The whole point with COMPILE_TEST is that it's
enabling unrealistic things that probably aren't practically useful.

> That's true, but it's a matter of quantity versus quality. Would you
> rather test build the code twice in its crippled form, which may
> trigger false-positive warnings or hide actual warnings, or just once
> in its proper form, where all warnings and build failures are real? I
> definitely believe the latter is a better use of our resources.

I'm not saying don't do the change, I'm saying don't oversell it.