Kumar, Grant:
On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 1:39 PM, Grant Likely grant.likely@secretlab.ca wrote:
On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 5:36 PM, John Rigby jcrigby@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 5:26 PM, Kumar Gala galak@kernel.crashing.org wrote:
....
The problem w/libfdt is that use of 'offsets' to get to nodes can be problematic if the offset changes while manipulating it. There are ways around thus but a number of functions we do would benefit from a more live tree.
This is actually a really good point. Offsets changing under your feet is just asking for bugs. I could see this as being a legitimate justification for having a live tree model in libfdt and the ability to transition between the live and flat representations. I was against this when we chatted on IRC the other day as it sounds like overkill, but this is a legitimate concern. dtc has a live tree representation that could probably be migrated into libfdt.
I don't think I fully understood Kumar's question when he first sent it. Now I want to understand. Are these gotcha's and workaround's with libfdt documented anywhere? If not then I would be willing to write up something. But I'll need some pointers to get me started. In the longer term how much work do you think it would be to make libfdt's internal representation dynamic? I would be willing spend some time on this if the consensus is that it is worth having.
Thanks, John