Unverified Commit 8b0beb45 authored Apr 13, 2026 by Krzysztof Kozlowski Committed by Arnd Bergmann Apr 20, 2026

Documentation/process: maintainer-soc: Document purpose of defconfigs

Common mistake in commit messages of patches on mailing list adding
CONFIG options to arm/multi_v7 or arm64/defconfig is saying what that
patch is doing, e.g. "Enable driver foo". That is obvious from the diff
part, thus explaining it does not bring any value. What brings value is
to understand why "driver foo" should be in a shared, upstream
defconfig, especially considering that distros have their own defconfigs
and we do not care about non-upstream trees.

Signed-off-by: Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzysztof.kozlowski@oss.qualcomm.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20260413074401.27282-4-krzysztof.kozlowski@oss.qualcomm.com

Signed-off-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>

parent f325b239

Documentation/process/maintainer-soc.rst

+10 −0

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -207,3 +207,13 @@ The subject line of a pull request should begin with "[GIT PULL]" and made using
		a signed tag, rather than a branch. This tag should contain a short description
		summarising the changes in the pull request. For more detail on sending pull
		requests, please see Documentation/maintainer/pull-requests.rst.

		Defconfigs purpose
		~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

		Defconfigs are primarily used by the kernel developers, because distros have
		their own configs. A change adding new CONFIG options to a defconfig should
		explain why the kernel developers in general would want such option, e.g. by
		providing a name of an upstream-supported machine/board using that new option.
		This implies that enabling options in defconfig for non-upstream machines shall
		not be accepted.