On 08/01/2013 05:18 AM, David Woodhouse wrote:

On Wed, 2013-07-31 at 17:26 -0400, jonsmirl at gmail.com wrote:

quoted

Alternatively you may be of the belief that it is impossible to get
rid of the board specific code. But x86 doesn't have any of it, why
should ARM?

The reason x86 doesn't have it is because it carries three decades worth
of legacy baggage so that it can still look like a 1980s IBM PC when
necessary.

There *have* been some x86 platforms which abandon that legacy crap, and
for those we *do* have board-specific code. (Is James still maintaining
Voyager support? It feels very strange to talk about Voyager with it
*not* being the 'legacy crap' in question...)

We've even seen *recent* attempts to abandon the legacy crap in the
embedded x86 space, which backtracked and added it all back again ? in
part because x86 lacked any sane way to describe the hardware if it
wasn't pretending to be a PC. ACPI doesn't cut it, and DT "wasn't
invented here"...

Unless you want the ARM world to settle on a strategy of "all the world
is an Assabet", I'd be careful what you wish for...

There is some level of belief that ACPI will enable running this years
OS on next years h/w. This idea is completely flawed as long as ARM
vendors don't design for compatibility, spin the Si for compatibility
issues, and have some mechanism to emulate legacy h/w. All the
discussions and issues around DT bindings and processes will apply to
ACPI bindings as well.

Rob