Hi, just noticed an even bigger init.rc mess than I thought existed when looking into why gatord wasn't launched on some boards.
Right now, we have
system/core/rootdir/init.rc device/linaro/common/init.rc device/linaro/origen/init.rc device/linaro/snowball/init.rc
The files are pretty much all the same. IMO we should really use a common init.rc for every board (local stuff like loading board specific modules can be done in the init.BOARDNAME.rc additions) - only that way, stuff we fix there (e.g. support for USB devices that will work everywhere) is fixed across all boards.
The differences between the various board specific init.rcs is the partition layout (snowball boots from mmcblk1p* instead of mmcblk0p*, origen has another boot partition causing the partition numbers to be off by 1). That's easily unifyable with sed in Android.mk; I've actually fixed that in Gingerbread, but apparently it was lost in the transition to ICS. I'll put that back.
The open question is whether we should use device/linaro/common/init.rc or system/core/rootdir/init.rc for every board. (Fortunately the files are nearly identical, so either way we won't have much work). The argument for using the former is that it's directly under our control so AOSP won't break it. The argument for using the latter is that if AOSP updates it to enable cool new stuff, we'll automatically get it when we pull in the update - and that it's closer to upstream. I vote for the latter, but this is probably not a decision I should just make by myself. Other opinions?
ttyl bero