On Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:06:07 -0800 Marcel Moolenaar xcllnt@mac.com wrote:
I fully realize that for developers who's focus is U-Boot, anything that runs on top of U-Boot and that wants something from U-Boot is a burden at times, but it is important to realize that U-Boot is most of the time nothing more than the first step towards a useful machine and that there can be more than 2 steps in getting on OS to run. The ability to make use of the (hardware) knowledge that U-Boot has, and at the same time its ability to abstract it for the next steps, is in my opinion just as important as having its own prompt.
I agree, but I thought exporting u-boot's hardware knowledge was the whole point of the Device Tree (libfdt) stuff?
It's not that I'm really objecting to the new interface -- it does seem to be more well-designed than the old jumptable stuff -- but it's just that I don't understand why you need this functionality in the first place, just to be able to boot an OS. When you have a kernel image as well as possibly other related images loaded into memory, along with a device tree providing detailed information about the hardware, why do you need a syscall interface on top of everything?
Haavard