Hi Grant, On Mon, May 26, 2014 at 12:48 PM, Grant Likely <grant.likely@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, 20 May 2014 09:38:49 +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 7:50 AM, Grant Likely <grant.likely@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> Why has the overlay system been designed for plugging and unpluging whole >> >> overlays? >> >> That means the kernel has to remember the full stack, causing issues with >> >> e.g. kexec. >> > >> > Mostly so that drivers don't see any difference in the livetree data >> > structure. It also means that userspace sees a single representation of >> > the hardware at any given time. >> >> Sorry, I don't follow the argument about the "single representation of the >> hardware". > > Er, s/of the hardware/of the tree/. Right now the overlay design > modifies the live tree which at the same time modifies the tree > representation in /sys/firmware/devicetree. If the design was changed to > keep the overlay logically separate, then I would think we want to > expose that information to usespace also. In fact, I think we would need > to for usecases like kexec. OK, so it does modify the real tree, and doesn't keep the actual overlays. I was under the impression the overlay stack was also kept in memory, to allow reversal, so there was a misunderstanding. Hence for kexec, the tree in /sys/firmware/devicetree can just be passed to the new kernel, as that's the current representation of the hardware? Gr{oetje,eeting}s, Geert -- Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. -- Linus Torvalds -- 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