Re: [PATCH 0/3] patches to allow DTB to be appended to the ARM zImage

On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 10:52:17AM +0100, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:

On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 05:38:23PM +0800, Shawn Guo wrote:

quoted

On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 10:21:31AM +0100, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:

quoted

What if your platform doesn't use uboot?

Add dtb parsing support with the help from libfdt, I guess.  It is
some amount of work, but it's not a rewrite of bootloader, IMHO.

I guess you're suggesting that this wrapper uses libfdt to merge
the ATAGs with the DT info?

No, ATAGs does not play at all in this case.  For u-boot example
again, if it boots a dt kernel, dtb will be parsed to get cmdline
node overwritten as bootargs env value, and then it boots the dt
kernel with this updated dtb.

I think this is getting messy - and I think that we've made a design
error with the boot process in thinking that we'll have either ATAGs
_or_ DT.  While we can continue to stuff the early kernel parts like
decompressors and such like with this stuff, it's getting painful and
over complicated.

It would have been far better to have passed both the ATAGs _and_ DT
to the kernel directly and let it sort them out without having to
teach several layers about DT parsing.

-- 
Regards,
Shawn