actually, in the discussion on linux kernel it was proposed to make the bootloader pass this information to the kernel, and there was a large amount of opposition from many of the ARM people to this suggestion.
based on this I don't believe that it works that way today.
Posted Apr 14, 2011 23:28 UTC (Thu) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955)
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It does work the way I said: the boot loader passes in a machine type number. But the kernel still has to have a built-in definiton of each machine type.
The current discussion is about having the boot loader pass in a fuller machine description (the Device Tree). This may simply be tacked onto the end of the kernel image in some way, so there is no need to modify existing boot loaders.