On Wednesday 27 May 2009 09:52:35 Haavard Skinnemoen wrote:
Wolfgang Denk wrote:
component X is always supposed to come before component Y, that can be done with different levels of initcalls, or just by arranging the makefiles appropriately (with a comment warning people not to change it).
The problem is that there is no such fix order. It is board dependent.
In other words, what we have right now is the worst of both worlds:
- There are shitloads of #ifdefs in the arch code to cope with different board requirements.
ACK. Most of this code was added a long time ago. We wouldn't accept this board specific "hacks" (especially in lib_ppc/board.c) in the common code right now any more.
- There are huge differences between each architecture's init sequence which makes it hard to write generic code elsewhere, and hard to maintain each architecture since the init sequence needs to be changed when new boards add new features, and there's no "standard" way of doing it so the chances of getting it right to begin with are very slim.
Also, the chances of getting this mess cleaned up is very slim since you need to touch all architectures in order to change something.
Yes, I noticed this while moving the malloc initialisation to an earlier stage. It would be really a great improvement if we could consolidate those lib_arch/board.c implementations somehow.
IMO, introducing a common init sequence for all architectures would be an important step on the way to make this code somewhat maintainable, no matter how messy the initial result ends up being. Or perhaps a better first step would be to clean up the ppc code since it's what new architectures tend to copy, and it's just such an insane mess right now.
ACK. Even though I don't have a clue right now how this could be accomplished in practise without breaking some of the (old) board ports.
Nevertheless I think that Jean-Christophe's inicall approach is a good idea which could/should be used here.
Best regards, Stefan
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