Mitch Bradley wrote:
The second topic is the hypothetical use of OFW as a HAL. That will not
happen for several reasons. The opposition to the idea is widespread
and deeply held, and there are good arguments to support that
opposition. Furthermore, the economic conditions necessary for the
creation of such a HAL do not exist in the ARM world, nor indeed in the
Linux world in general. (The necessary condition is the ability for one
company to impose a substantial change by fiat - essentially a monopoly
position.)
Shall we agree, then, that any further discussion of the HAL issue is
"just for fun", and that nobody needs to feel threatened that it would
actually happen?
I've recently worked with vendor versions of U-Boot for advanced ARM
SoCs. There is already *huge* chunk of HAL code in those versions. And
if there would be possibility to have callbacks into the firmware these
chunks would only grow, IMHO.
The potential for "vendors breaking out of the debugging use case and
turning it into a HAL" is miniscule, because
a) The callback is disabled by default
b) The technical challenges of the callback interface limit its
applicability to specific "wizard user" scenarios
c) OFW is unlikely to achieve sufficient market penetration for the HAL
thing to be worth doing
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--
Sincerely yours,
Mike.
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