On 14 Jan 2002, Eric W. Biederman wrote: > Well I don't think openboot/openfirmware has text based tables but > I may be wrong there. My honest opinion is that we are probably best > off defining our own table structures, and doing the corresponding kernel > patches. That way we don't have other people's legacy junk getting > in the way :)
Maybe my memory is too fuzzy. Have you used a SPARC recently? I have not. But my old memory says that all the devices on a sparc were defined in textual strings in the forth boot prom. It seemed that linux had code to parse this in the sparc tree. I will now walk across the hall and try my friend's mac ... I can't get it into an OF prompt so who knows. Actually though it used to be that if you walked the / tree in sunos/solaris you saw a textual representation of all the machine resources. This directory tree was yanked directly from the Open Firmware strings. It might be worth a look. I hate to bring this up as I know you've been working very hard on your tables, but at the same time I figure we should take a look at it. That's also not to say that the Open Firmware tables are the right way. It's more a question which Werner asked that got me to thinking: should they be textual tables? Also I've been using Plan 9 a lot in the last year and have begun to like text-based things like that. I turned on some debug and found that we're getting through memory, the regions look good, and I get at least to: hardware_setup and finish it OK. ron
