On Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:09 +0100 Rafal Jaworowski raj@semihalf.com wrote:
Haavard Skinnemoen wrote:
I agree, but I thought exporting u-boot's hardware knowledge was the whole point of the Device Tree (libfdt) stuff?
Well, not all U-Boot platforms use the device tree abstraction: it's only PowerPC+Linux combination. MIPS, ARM and other archs don't use it, operating systems other than Linux, to name only *BSD and VxWorks, similar.
True, but wouldn't it make more sense to try to unify this rather than adding another interface?
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?
Let me try to summarize the FreeBSD booting approach:
<snip>
Hope that helped explain the scenario a bit.
It did. Thanks.
Haavard