On Wed, 30 Mar 2011, david at lang.hm wrote:

On Wed, 30 Mar 2011, Nicolas Pitre wrote:

quoted

Furthermore, this does create pain.  you have to make things in sync
between the kernel and the mini-kernel (let's call it bootloader).  In
practice the bootloader is always maintained separately from the kernel,
on its own pace and with its own release schedule.  Trying to
synchronize independent projects is really painful as you know already,
otherwise the user space for perf would still be maintained separately
from the kernel, right?

Being separate from the kernel with it's own release schedule could be a good
thing.

It could.  It didn't work well for oprofile.  That's why perf was 
included in the kernel tree which so far appears to be a success.

using the example of clocks. if the clock definitions were in the bootloader
project, then when a new board is produced with a slightly different clock
arrangement, all you have to do is to update the bootloader to pass the new
definition to the kernel, and then you can use a well tested kernel that has
been put through it's paces on other hardware already.

Sure.  And that's the perfect case.  I've yet to see things work so 
well in practice.

Today you have to get the change upstream into the kernel, and then use the
new kernel (which always includes new features and bugs that you have to test
for)

No.  Today you have to get the change working in the current stable 
kernel locally and test it before you submit it upstream.

the two pieces do not need to be released and updated in lockstep. yes, there
will be (many) cases where a new kernel adds support for a new type of device,
but the communications format between the bootloader and the kernel can be
designed to be tolorant of such skew. Even before the kernel knows how to
drive the hardware you can have the format of the information about that
hardware defined (allowing the bootloader to pass information to the kernel
that it just ignores because it doesn't have a driver in it for that
particulare piece of hardware), and if the bootloader doesn't tell the kernel
about some device, the kernel will just ignore that device.

Today we have no such communication format with its limitations and 
compatibility issues to care about.  That allows for much greater 
flexibility just as the kernel internal APIs are not guaranteed to be 
stable.  The major drawback is a lack of forward compatibility meaning 
that for every new piece of hardware to come you need a kernel update.  
There is simply no magic solution.

this means that you need to have some group doing the equivalent of assigning
device numbers for the different devices (and in this case going just a little
further to define what setup parameters will be needed), initially this may be
a little rough, but after a very short time I would expect the people doing
this work to start recognising that even though vendor A who first proposes
this device has some things hard-wired, the definition format should support
these things as variables instead of being assumed.

Ideally, yes.  but if every vendor has a different set of peripherals, 
and from one SOC revision to the next from the same vendor you still 
have different hardware knobs, then you still have to add yet more code 
to the kernel.  And that doesn't solve the issue of dynamic clock and 
power management at runtime either for which custom code is still 
required.

As long as SOC vendors keep producing wildly different architectures 
besides the core CPU we'll have this problem.  Denying the reality won't 
make that problem go away either.  And device tree won't stop those 
vendor from still trying to do things differently (better?) because they 
are not constrained by having to ensure this single proprietary software 
stack still boot.


Nicolas