[Ksummit-2013-discuss] ARM topic: Is DT on ARM the solution, or is there something better?
Ben Dooks
ben.dooks at codethink.co.uk
Mon Oct 21 14:18:40 UTC 2013
On 20/10/13 23:08, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 10:26:54PM +0100, Stephen Warren wrote:
>
>> IIRC (and perhaps I don't; it was really slightly before my active
>> involvement in kernel development) Linus triggered the whole ARM DT
>> conversion in response to disliking the volume of changes, and
>> conflicts, in board files. The idea of DT conversion being that all the
>> board-specific details could be moved out of the kernel and into DT
>> files, thus causing him not to have to see it.
>
> A large part of this was to do with the needs of distros and their users
> - they have a strong need to ship a device neutral kernel and to have a
> reasonable ability to have their kernel deploy on hardware unknown to
> them. Allowing the device tree to be delivered with the system rather
> than have the board configuration in the kernel helps achieve that goal.
Shame we are not at a start where we can just have a board with a DT in
the loader and just have a kernel work on it. At the moment I still have
to append the DTB to the kernel I build before booting it on a board as
different kernel versions required different dtb blobs.
--
Ben Dooks http://www.codethink.co.uk/
Senior Engineer Codethink - Providing Genius
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