Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [PATCH] Open Firmware device tree virtual filesystem | From | Benjamin Herrenschmidt <> | Date | Tue, 02 Jan 2007 14:43:26 +1100 |
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> I'm incredibly surprised how much resistence there is from the > i386 OFW folks to do this right. It would be like 80 lines of > code to suck the device tree into kernel memory, or if they don't > want to do that they can use inline function wrappers to provide > the clean C-language interface to all of this and the cost to > i386-OFW would be zero with the benefit that other platforms could > use the code potentially. > > Doing the same thing 3 different ways, knowingly, is just very bad > engineering. That is how you end up with a big fat pile of > unmaintainable poo instead of a clean maintainable source tree. If we > fix a bug in one of these things, the other 2 are so different that if > the bug is in the others we'll never know and it's not easy to check > so people won't do it. > > So please do this crap right.
I strongly agree. Nowadays, both powerpc and sparc use an in-memory copy of the tree (wether you use the flattened format during the trampoline from OF runtime to the kernel or not is a different matter, we created that for the sake of kexec and embedded devices with no real OF, but the end result is the same, a kernel based tree structure).
There is already powerpc's /proc/device-tree and sparc's openpromfs, I'm all about converging that to a single implementation (a filesystem is fine) that uses the in-memory tree.
Ben.
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