On Fri, 20 May 2005, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
Ok, I got some numbers here. (I have removed the page alignment
Thanks!
I think we'll just have to try all that out for ourselves. Simple boards will probably be at the lower end of your figures, which *should* be fine for most people.
How do you view this, though: couldn't it happen in the future, once the dev-tree has been widely established, that more and more drivers are converted to pull their properties off the tree, because it is so convenient? That *could* lead to rising expectations toward the firmware, and make what once was a small blob a big blob. Is it reasonable to assume drivers will #ifdef such behaviour?
Again, I'm just thinking here, no opinions yet. Well, if you want one: <opinion> Actually I always liked the idea of clever firmware, which usually knows the underlying hardware best. </opinion>
- The complete device-tree of my PowerMac laptop (this is _huge_, Apple
puts a _lot_ of stuff in there, way more than most embedded board even the most complex ones will ever need) fits into a 37k blob.
Don't underestimate embedded hardware. The MPC5554 has 286(!) selectable-priority interrupt sources... :-)
Cheers, Marius