On 08/05/2013 11:53 PM, Andy Green wrote:
U-Boot is bound up with compile-time decisions about targeting a single board at the moment, but if we're talking about long term decisions like /boot/dtb/ just like ARM isn't the only consideration U-Boot is not the only bootloader.
Once kernels capable of running a single binary on many platforms are common (they're already workable) pressure for the bootloader to do likewise will increase. So it'd be a shame to block that by choosing a dtb convention that assumes there's only one on the image.
I don't want to drag things vastly off-topic, but in some cases U-Boot does support multiple platforms on a single binary, it's just limited to the same SoC family and there being run-time differentiation possible (or being one of the platforms that uses DTs today). Once DTs are more fully fleshed out for ARM platforms and stable some further re-jiggering may be possible (and would rely, probably, on some standard way to merge device trees).
And of course, +1 to making sure the convention is widely re-usable. I sighed to myself late last year when I saw Ubuntu shoving dtbs under /lib and Fedora under /boot and wondering where the communications breakdown happened.