On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 6:47 PM, luke.leighton <luke.leigh...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 10:59 PM, Henrik Nordström > <hen...@henriknordstrom.net> wrote: > >>> .... and then there's the boot0 and boot1 loaders, these *do* have > >> no, these are not tiny. boot0 is 24KB to fit the initial embedded SRAM >> (not cache), but boot1 is on pair with u-boot in size and runs from >> DRAM. > > btw, please listen to henrik: he knows what he's talking about, as > you can see :) henrik, thank you for correcting my technical > misunderstandings, i'll try to remember them and not propagate > incorrect stuff.
This is not about the fex syntax or uboot. The root problem is needing two sets of binding for every device driver in the kernel. Pick a random driver like gpio-pca953x.c and look at the source. In that file there are #ifdef CONFIG_OF_ sections. Those sections are directly reading the FDT binary via calls like of_get_property(node, "linux,gpio-base", &size);. If fex is added to the kernel every driver driver will now need both a #ifdef CONFIG_OF_ section and also a #ifdef CONFIG_FEX_ section. Doing that is just crazy. Is Allwinner going to add fex support to every single device driver in the kernel? Of course not, that task is far too large. What Allwinner needs to do is come onto the common API that everyone else is using. So consider what is going to happen if you try to use a pca953x chip in an Allwinner system. You're going to have to rewrite part of the device driver. You're going to have to do that for every chip you try to use. Those forks won't be accepted back into the kernel, etc. And you'll end up as yet another port and forget embedded developer. As for uboot I hope you are using the SPL support and haven't reimplemented it. If the full uboot has been modified to dynamically read a script.bin then it shouldn't be much of a stretch to teach it about FDT instead. That would be a useful feature to add to mainline uboot. As for fex2bin and bin2fex you already have the equivalent tool on your machine. It is called dtc. Check out scripts/dtc. So if you are in love with fex syntax write a script that converts it into device tree syntax. Then compile the DTS using dtc into a DTB. When the DTB is in memory it is a FDT (flattened device tree). It's that FDT format in memory that has become fixed in stone. -- Jon Smirl jonsm...@gmail.com -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
