Re: [PATCH 1/2] fdt: Allow stacked overlays phandle references

Hi David,

On Mon, 2017-07-03 at 19:06 +1000, David Gibson wrote:

On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 05:52:25PM +0300, Pantelis Antoniou wrote:

quoted

This patch enables an overlay to refer to a previous overlay's
labels by performing a merge of symbol information at application
time.

This seems to be doing things the hard way.

It is the minimal implementation to get things to work, with the current
overlay implementation. I do have plans for a version 2 with fixes to
a number of areas.
 

You're essentially extending the semantics of overlay application to
add the symbol merging.  You've implemented these extended semantics
in libfdt, which is all very well, but that's not the only overlay
application implementation.

This is a port of the same patch that's against the linux kernel.
As far as I know there's no other implementations, or at least none
that are open source.

It seems to me a better approach would be to change dtc's -@
implementation, so that in /plugin/ mode instead of making a global
__symbols__ node, it puts it into the individual fragments.  That way
the existing overlay application semantics will update the __symbols__
node.

A lot of things can be made better, on the next version. These are
minimally intrusive patches to address user requests for the current
implementation.

Why don't we start by making a list, and work towards that goal?

Care to start about what you want addressed and how?

Regards

-- Pantelis