On Tue, Jul 17, 2007 at 07:47:26AM +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote: > > That "typical practice" is inspired by the need to explicitly > > put #address-cells and #size-cells into the device tree if you > > want Linux to properly parse the device tree, even if the default > > values would work perfectly (if Linux would work correctly, > > that is). > > Linux does handle default values in some areas. The problem with default > values is that they are badly defined and the spec contains gray areas > and contradictions as to what the default values should be in some > circumstances. As a general matter, I dislike default values because > they somewhat require background knowledge of what default values should > be in different contexts to "read" a device-tree. To be simple, I > believe default values are a bad idea.
Right. See, there are people like me that don't know what the default values are/should be. Having them explicitly listed, even if it's redundant, serves as a good learning aid. Now, realistically I do know what the default is in this case. But I only learned that recently. With hopefully more people starting to port things over to arch/powerpc it might be a good idea to document them at least. Otherwise, I fear we'd wind up repeating ourselves over and over. Could we get a 'thou shalt not rely on defaults' added to booting-without-of.txt? Or maybe something less draconian ;). josh _______________________________________________ Linuxppc-dev mailing list Linuxppc-dev@ozlabs.org https://ozlabs.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxppc-dev
