Linux 5.19-rc6

[Linus Torvalds]

On Wed, Jul 13, 2022 at 2:01 PM Alex Deucher <alexdeucher at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If you want to apply Guenter's patch original patch:
> https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/490184/
> That's fine with me.

Honestly, by this time I feel that it's too little, too late.

The ppc people apparently didn't care at all about the fact that this
driver didn't compile.

At least Michael Ellerman and Daniel Axtens were cc'd on that thread
with the proposed fix originally.

I don't see any replies from ppc people as to why it happened, even
though apparently a bog-standard "make allmodconfig" just doesn't
build.

I'd try it myself, since I do have a cross-build environment for some
earlier cross-build verification I did.

But since my upgrade to F36 it now uses gcc-12, and possibly due to
that I get hundreds of errors long before I get to any drm drivers:

  Cannot find symbol for section 19: .text.create_section_mapping.
  arch/powerpc/mm/mem.o: failed
  ...
  Cannot find symbol for section 19: .text.cpu_show_meltdown.
  drivers/base/cpu.o: failed
  Error: External symbol 'memset' referenced from prom_init.c

this cross environment used to work for me, but something changed (I
mention gcc-12, but honestly, that's based on nothing at all, except
for the few problems it caused on x86-64. It could be something
entirely unrelated, but it does look like some bad interaction with
-ffunction-sections).

So considering that the ppc people ignored this whole issue since the
merge window, I think it's entirely unreasonable to then apply a
ppc-specific patch for this at this time, when people literally asked
"why is this needed", and there was no reply from the powerpc side.

Does any of that sound like "we should support this driver on powerpc" to you?

                 Linus