@mjg59Matthew Garrett @azonenbergAndrew Zonenberg @daliasCassandrich And I want the ARM world to move away from the insanity that is the current DTBs:

* They suck at describing the hardware, they are more a Linux config file: Linux forks (vendor trees) will always have incompatible ones because upstream doesnt care about compatibility...
* Not only every SoC needs to be supported, every board needs its own broken DTB... Which leads to board-specific brokeness for SoC-provided features!
* Good mainline support never comes before the effective end of life of the device... Even with big companies working on it with significant resources!

By allowing DTBs to exist, vendors could start making SoCs very very diverse without caring about the software ecosystem. This is nuts and this insanity needs to be stopped by introducing discoverable buses and blocks, then add per-vendor platform drivers as a glue. Something akin to ACPI would then be introduced for board-specific customization.

You can keep the compatibles and the equivalent of a DTB to document if blocks are user-visible or not (so that he is not exposed to the user otherwise). New SoCs should finally be mostly backwards compatible, allowing basic release-day upstream support, and reducing the need for vendor trees, or the cost of mainlining.