On Mon, 29 Nov 2004, Brad Larson wrote: > hmm, the original email left the impression that its desirable for the The impression was right -- of course as long as the firmware actually has something useful to offer. > firmware to be available after kernel handoff. Looks like the current > status is fine for those who need it. It depends on what you want to achieve. For console output (early printk) support, it's usually only needed till the real console driver is registered, which is just a handful of lines to be printed. For debugging you may want to support console I/O via the firmware during a normal system use, but then performance is not that important. Other uses may include calls to functions for access to firmware configuration, like environment variables you'd otherwise access from the firmware's operator interface, or fancy ways of doing a reboot. These are not performance-critical, either, so doing some sort of TLB reconfiguration within the firmware for the duration of callbacks would be acceptable. Maciej
