Hi Gabe, On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 1:04 PM, Gabe Black <gabebl...@chromium.org> wrote: > > > On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 5:49 PM, Graeme Russ <graeme.r...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Hi Gabe, >> >> On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 12:43 PM, Gabe Black <gabebl...@chromium.org> >> wrote: >> > This change adds a pointer to the global data structure in x86 to point >> > to >> > the device tree. This mirrors an identical pointer in ARM. >> >> Out of curiosity, is this paving the way for FDT support in general? >> If so, to what extent does the Linux kernel support FDT for x86? >> >> I have had thoughts about looking into what Device Tree / FDT is all >> about, and I'm wondering what it is going to bring to the table >> (positive and negative) for x86. For example, would this, in theory, >> depricate the boot_params structure, e820 map etc... >> >> Regards, >> >> Graeme > > > > The device tree can be used in two different ways, by u-boot and by the > kernel. This is for use by u-boot itself and is one mechanism coreboot can > use to make its own runtime modification to how u-boot is set up (if there's > a serial console it can use, for instance), and it is fairly useful. The > kernel has some very minimal provisions for passing in a device tree in x86 > through, if I remember correctly, basically a linked list of entries which > hang off the end of the boot_params structure. The kernel doesn't take
I thought this list was just a linked list of more e820 entries (and that is what the code seems to suggest) > advantage of it at all, so it wouldn't really be useful to pass one in. > There are times when it would be a good solution to certain problems but the > kernel would have to actually be set up to take advantage of it first. Does UEFI support device trees? If so, I wonder if this is the future of Linux and x86 support is somewhat inevitable? Regards, Graeme _______________________________________________ U-Boot mailing list U-Boot@lists.denx.de http://lists.denx.de/mailman/listinfo/u-boot
