Herd your socs become a matchmaker

About 60% of the Linux kernel source tree is devoted to drivers for a large variety of supported hardware components. Especially in the embedded world, the number of different SoC families, versions, and revisions, integrating a myriad of “IP cores”, keeps on growing.

In this presentation, Geert will explain how to match drivers against hardware, and how to support a wide variety of (dis)similar devices, without turning platform and driver code into an entangled bowl of spaghetti.tra

Starting with a brief history of driver matching in Linux, he will fast-forward to device-tree based matching. He will discuss ways to handle slight variations of the same hardware devices, and different SoC revisions, each with their own quirks and bugs. Finally, Geert will show best practices for evolving device drivers in a maintainable way, based on his experiences as an embedded Linux kernel developer and maintainer.