On 10/20/2013 11:08 PM, 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. Yes. I guess one thing I didn't make clear was my hope that whatever firmware API or VM host implementation exists would be pre-installed on the system so that distros never had to deal with it, or even know it existed. That would then transform the many different HW configurations into a single HW configuration as far as distros are concerned, since they only target running as firmware clients or VM guests. Essentially, we are creating a standard platform in SW, which perhaps is still possible, rather than in HW, which seems unlikely at present. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe devicetree" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html