On 12/07/2010 11:09 AM, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
There are many board vendors who shipt boards with different configurations - with or without NAND flash; with or without other peripherals like CAN contollers, LCD, etc.; with different LCD sizes and types, in portrait or landscape orientation, etc. Some of these features can be determined by probing the hardware, others (like the orientation of a LCD) cannot. It is sometimes a maintenance nightmare to provide tens of different configurations of U-Boot for a single product. Being able to cinfigure available hardware through the DT, and using a single common binary image of U-Boot for such systems would be a great benefit.
That's fine, but so far I don't see how it's related. This is information u-boot needs during its own initialization, right?
We need a way for our tools to specify information to the kernels' initialization, and still want u-boot to do all the hardware configuration it does today. It really doesn't matter to us if in the future u-boot uses device trees for that configuration: we just need a way to interact with the kernels.
Hollis Blanchard Mentor Graphics, Embedded Systems Division