On 09/13/2012 11:32 AM, Dennis Gilmore wrote:
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Hey all,
So as distros we are soon going to be forced to support DTB files. Fedora likely sooner than the rest as we closely follow the mainline kernel throughout the life of a fedora release. Ideally the device manufacturers will provide dtb files. but then devices like the pandaboard, beagleboardXM etc with no storage to speak of we have to ship u-boot so likely will need to ship dtb files also. so far the best vendor i know of for dtb support is calxeda. and thats where we should encourage vendors to emulate, but until we get to there we need to take baby steps.
Thanks. :)
Just so you know, the long term plan is to split dts files out of the kernel. It is there now for historical reasons (ppc was already there) and because things are changing rapidly for the ARM dts files. Generally speaking, the dtb's and kernels don't need to be in sync and it should be considered a kernel bug if a new kernel does not work with an older dtb. Likewise, new dtb's should not break old kernels.
Ubuntu is building at least the highbank dtb now, but it is primarily for running qemu.
I was wondering what the distros were planning to do, or has it even been considered? Fedora 18 will likely ship 3.6.x but will be updated to 3.7.1 likely and also 3.8.x if not 3.9.x We get the joy of things breaking every kernel release because no one else seems to be testing or using the upstream kernel.
I would like to see us as distros and linaro go to the vendors and get them to ship dtb files and updated u-boot with dtb support. Ideally with some consistent macro use to make distro support of u-boot saner. appended dtb is pretty ugly and I do not want to support it. I feel like we have an opportunity here to correct some of the wrongs of the past as u-boot updates will be forced on the world to deal with the forced move to DeviceTree. do we have vendors on this list? if not can we get the list of contacts and reach out to them to get things straightened up?
At least some vendors are.
There was some discussion about u-boot standardization recently on this list, but it was more on the environment side and boot device selection. There is already a default config in u-boot, but that still leaves off lots of things. Perhaps creating a "standard" config that platforms include would be the first step. This could turn on EFI partitions, ext2 fs, hush shell, FDT, etc. Dealing with old bootloaders is still another issue.
Rob
Dennis -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.18 (GNU/Linux)
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