Neil Armstrong

I am thrilled to be back at FOSDEM. It is a fantastic opportunity to meet with the open source community and connect with fellow developers at such a great conference!

Please join me this Saturday in the FOSS on Mobile devroom. I will be presenting the technical evolution of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, demonstrating how we achieved full mainline support—from power management to the Adreno GPU—running on actual product hardware.

I look forward to seeing you there.
Saturday, 18:30 | Room UB4.132

#FOSDEM #Linux #UBoot #OpenSource #Snapdragon #Mainline

Finally, 100% Amlogic DT successfully #dtbindings check on linux-next !

=> https://gitlab.com/amlogic-foss/linux-amlogic-ci/-/pipelines/1585655603/test_report?job_name=dtbs_check

I’m happy to announce the Amlogic ARM64 Device Tree is now fully documented in linux-next, ready for v6.12!

Since the beginning of Device Tree on Linux, we documented how it should be written so drivers could know what to expect, it’s called “bindings”, it’s a sort of “contract” between Device Tree and drivers.

But those were written in human readable open text format, without any automated way to verify Device Tree files. There were numerous attempts, but ultimately Rob Herring leveraged JSON Schema [1] into “dtschema” [2] leading to this patch serie https://lore.kernel.org/all/20181005165848.3474-1-robh@kernel.org/.

Thus “dtschema” made it possible to write bindings in YAML and the developed scripts would convert Device Tree in YAML and run a validation with JSON Schema validation. This was merged in end of 2018 then conversion of the text files in YAML files started.

For reference, there were 3278 text bindings in Linux 4.20 git tree, in today’s Linux next for v6.12 only 1250 text files remains but there’s 4345 yaml files now! In addition to the transition to yaml bindings, new platforms were introduced using the new format.

Around one year ago, I upstreamed support for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and it was fully documented from day 1, and most of the changes was yaml bindings change since the SoC was mainly an upgrade from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 I helped upstream 2 years ago.

Let’s go back to Amlogic, were I started converting the text file to yaml bindings in August 2019 (see [3]), and finally ended the transition early this month with the patch [4]. This makes the Amlogic ARM64 Device Trees join fully documented along other platforms like Samsung Exynos

If you want to know more about Device Tree validation, you can look at my @LinaroLtd@mastodon.social colleague @krzk@social.kernel.org talk he did in this year's #EOSS in Seattle https://sched.co/1aBEf!

Now the links:
[1] https://json-schema.org/
[2] https://github.com/devicetree-org/dt-schema
[3] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20190801135644.12843-1-narmstrong@baylibre.com/
[4] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20240905-topic-amlogic-upstream-gxlx-drop-iio-compat-v2-1-7a690eb95bc2@linaro.org/
Thanks for reading !

Nearly 8 years later I’ll be speaking again about why it’s not to late to upstream your legacy Linux based platform in 2 weeks time at #EOSS24 #ELCNA @ Seattle ! https://eoss24.sched.com/event/1aBEe/no-its-still-never-too-late-to-upstream-your-legacy-linux-based-platforms-neil-armstrong-linaro

Nice coverage of my @fosdem@fosstodon.org talk by Phoronix https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qualcomm-Mainline-Linux-2024

Spent a nice weekend at #FOSDEM2024 ! Nice to see so much people attending this volunteer-based conference! It’s really a special and very enjoyable place to speak about Open Source.
I was happy to be selected to speak to this year’s edition in the FOSS on Mobile devroom, thx to all the organizers!

I made it this year, I’m in Brussels for #FOSDEM ! Join me tomorrow in room h1309 at 11h30 CEST for my talk about the mainline Linux state of Qualcomm SoCs and @LinaroLtd@mastodon.social engineers work to achieve current state https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-1707-mainline-linux-on-qualcomm-socs-are-we-here-now-/

A new milestone has been achieved, the @Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 now boots from linux-next defconfig with no additional changes!
This means all necessary changes are in the Maintainers git trees and will be sent to Linus in the next Linux merge window planned in 2 or 3 weeks!

$ uname -a
Linux qemuarm64 6.7.0-rc4-next-20231211-gbbd220ce4e29 #83 SMP PREEMPT Mon Dec 11 09:26:08 CET 2023 aarch64 GNU/Linux