On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 1:26 PM, Andy Green andy@warmcat.com wrote:
On 04/03/2011 06:19 PM, Somebody in the thread at some point said:
hardware in the device tree and remove the old kernel code that was building the description. Move on to device trees provided by the bootloader. After basic hardware description is converted move on to
Can you describe why code in the bootloader is a better place than code in the kernel early init? I mean if you go and look in say U-Boot sources, it's a lot less beautiful and elegant than kernel code.
You shouldn't just move the init code into uboot, instead you should figure out how to encode the hardware specific information into the device tree using a generic schema. Then have code in the kernel that knows how to interpret this generic data.
Matt and I may differ a little on the responsibilities of the bootloader. I think it should do the bare minimum needed to get the kernel loaded and to feed it a device tree. Matt has it doing more like setting up all of the pin configurations. But I don't have a strong opinion on this.
The way things are set up currently I also don't believe you can remove all board specific code from the kernel. The goal with device trees is to start hacking away at the board specific code and make the piles of it smaller. In the future we may be able to remove it all like on the PC platform.