Documentation: RISC-V: Allow patches for non-standard behavior

The patch acceptance policy forbids accepting support for non-standard
behavior.  This policy was written in order to both steer implementers
towards the standards and to avoid coupling the upstream kernel too
tightly to vendor-specific features.  Those were good goals, but in
practice the policy just isn't working: every RISC-V system we have
needs vendor-specific behavior in the kernel and we end up taking that
support which violates the policy.  That's confusing for contributors,
which is the main reason we have a written policy in the first place.

So let's just start taking code for vendor-defined behavior.

Reviewed-by: Conor Dooley <conor.dooley@microchip.com>
Reviewed-by: Anup Patel <anup@brainfault.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul Walmsley <paul.walmsley@sifive.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/alpine.DEB.2.21.999.2211181027590.4480@utopia.booyaka.com/
[Palmer: merge in Paul's suggestions]
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20221207020815.16214-3-palmer@rivosinc.com
Signed-off-by: Palmer Dabbelt <palmer@rivosinc.com>
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Palmer Dabbelt 2022-12-06 18:08:13 -08:00
parent 37f0ab1477
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@ -29,7 +29,11 @@ their own custom extensions. These custom extensions aren't required
to go through any review or ratification process by the RISC-V
Foundation. To avoid the maintenance complexity and potential
performance impact of adding kernel code for implementor-specific
RISC-V extensions, we'll only accept patches for extensions that
have been officially frozen or ratified by the RISC-V Foundation.
(Implementors, may, of course, maintain their own Linux kernel trees
containing code for any custom extensions that they wish.)
RISC-V extensions, we'll only consider patches for extensions that either:
- Have been officially frozen or ratified by the RISC-V Foundation, or
- Have been implemented in hardware that is widely available, per standard
Linux practice.
(Implementors, may, of course, maintain their own Linux kernel trees containing
code for any custom extensions that they wish.)