The Linaro consortium debuts

Posted Jun 5, 2010 7:16 UTC (Sat) by glikely (subscriber, #39601)
In reply to: The Linaro consortium debuts by swetland
Parent article: The Linaro consortium debuts

Actually, linking the device tree into firmware is strongly discouraged for the reason you mention. Forcing a risky firmware upgrade because the data is bad is not good engineering.

The device tree is not intended to be the end-all-be-all description of how hardware works. It uniquely identifies the board (including variants of the same design). It describes the layout of devices and how they are interconnected. It provides enough information to the kernel so that very few things need to be hard coded. Overall, considerably better than what we currently have.

For the stuff that truly is machine-specific, it provides enough information for the OS to recognize it and choose the appropriate machine support code. Completely eliminating all machine-specific code isn't the design goal. Instead, the goal is to keep machine specific code restricted to the things that are truly machine specific.

(and, for the record, any kind of acpi-style bytecode is not a direction I will be taking the device tree support)

As for being skeptical; no worries. It's used on real shipping hardware now, and I accept it as a challenge to prove to you that it works for real shipping ARM platforms too. :-)