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 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. Gabe
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