On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 6:59 AM, Alban <albeu@xxxxxxx> wrote: > On Fri, 7 Nov 2014 12:09:33 +0000 > Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@xxxxxxx> wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> On Fri, Nov 07, 2014 at 11:14:09AM +0000, Alban Bedel wrote: >> > Allow embedding an FDT blob in the kernel image, this is mostly >> > useful to run new kernels on boards with old bootloaders. >> >> I am very much not keen on embedding a DTB within a kernel. It's far >> nicer for the two to remain separate blobs, with a small shim to set >> up the DTB address. >> >> On ARM we have appended DTB for this purpose, which is at least better >> than embedding the DT inside of the kernel. > > I looked at that but that seemed quiet complicated to implement, not to > mention that it needed quiet a lot of arch specific code. On the other > hand having the DTB built in like this was trivial and would be portable > to every architecture, so that seemed like the best way to me. > >> What architecture and bootloader are you using that necessitate this? > > MIPS with an antic u-boot version patched by the board vendor to use > some non standard image format. Updating the boot loader is currently > not an option because of the lack of documentation for the board/SoC. MIPS and a few other arches already have built-in dtb support. We don't need another way to do it, but I would welcome any clean-up that makes it arch independent and available to any arch. While Mark is right, I could envision other uses such as embedding overlay dtbs in the kernel either for add-on boards or just as fixups. Rob -- 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
