Hi All,
I'm sending this mail because Paul Kocialkowski (in the Cc) has submitted a patch for upstream u-boot to set the serial atag tag from u-boot for Allwinner SoCs, using the SoCs SID, which is a 128 bit register containing a unique number for each SoC.
In some cases a manufacturer may want to override this with its own serial from say an eeprom, as such it is desirable to communicate the serial from u-boot to the kernel rather then reproducing the sid reading code in the kernel.
For old atag using kernels there is an atag for this, and the contents of this tag will show up in /proc/cpuinfo, currently there is no equivalent for this in devicetree.
I'm a bit reluctant to merge Paul's patch into u-boot because of this as it will enable a feature on older kernels while leaving the upstream kernel without it.
So I was wondering how to deal with this in devicetree, at least one board in u-boot already sets a devicetree property for this:
board/gateworks/gw_ventana/gw_ventana.c 1202: * serial# env var 1207: char *serial = getenv("serial#"); 1432: setenv("serial#", str); 1512: fdt_setprop(blob, 0, "system-serial", getenv("serial#"), 1513: strlen(getenv("serial#")) + 1);
Which sets a system-serial property in the root node, so at the same level where we also have the model string this seems to make sense to me.
So do we want to add a devicetree binding for system serials, and if we do should we make it a string like above, or should we make it an 64 bit integer like the atag?
If we make it a string we can store longer serials, but how should we deal with those wrt /proc/cpuinfo? Only show the first 64 bits ?
Regards,
Hans