On May 19, 2005, at 8:18 AM, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
But my biggest concern is that we should try to come up with a solution that has a wider acceptance. Especially from the U-Boot point of view it is not exactly nice that each of PowerPC, ARM and MIPS use their very own, completely incompatible way of passing in- formation from the boot loader to the kernel.
As is, your proposal will add just another incompatible way of doing the same thing (of course we will have to stay backward compatible with U-Boot to allow booting older kernels, too).
Why don't we try to come up with a solution that is acceptable to the other architectures as well?
Maybe you want to post the RFC to lkml, or at least to the linux-arm-kernel and linux-mips mailing lists?
As you observe, having multiple incompatible communication mechanisms is an issue of u-boot code maintenance. Since you are the most affected party, perhaps you could propose something for all the architectures? You're obviously much more in tune with the needs of ARM and MIPS...
In the meantime, it sounds like this device tree stuff solves ppc64's problem in a way the maintainers are happy with, so it's hard to ask them to come up with a solution to a problem they don't have.
-Hollis