On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 11:49 AM, Pantelis Antoniou
[off-list ref] wrote:

Hi all,

This is a project I've been working on lately and it's finally in a
usuable form.

I'm introducing yamldt.

A YAML to DT blob generator/compiler, utilizing a YAML schema that is
functionaly equivalent to DTS and supports all DTS features.

What problem are you trying to solve?

yamldl parses a device tree description (source) file in YAML format and
outputs a (bit-exact if the -C option is used) device tree blob.

A DT aware YAML schema is a good fit as a DTS syntax alternative.

YAML is a human-readable data serialization language, and is expressive
enough to cover all DTS source features.

Simple YAML files are just key value pairs that are very easy to parse,
even without using a formal YAML parser. For instance YAML in restricted
environments may simple be appending a few lines of text in a given YAML
file.

The parsers of YAML are very mature, as it has been released in 2001. It
is in wide-spread use and schema validation tools are available. YAML
support is available for every major programming language.

Data in YAML can easily be converted to/form other format that a
particular tool that we may use in the future understands.

More importantly YAML offers (an optional) type information for each
data, which is IMHO crucial for thorough validation and checking against
device tree bindings (when they will be converted to a machine readable
format, preferably YAML).

We have type information in dts. We can distinguish numbers, strings,
phandles, etc. The problem is we loose that information in the DTB and
this does nothing to help that problem.

For more take a look here.

https://github.com/pantoniou/yamldt

Looking at the example, I find the syntax harder to follow. Parsing
what are node names vs labels is one. Relying on indentation for tree
hierarchy is another.

Does C preprocessing of the YAML files work? I'm surprised if it does.

I am eagerly awaiting for your comments.

I could see some uses here to extract data from dts files more easily.
For example, to extract all compatible strings for some set of dts
files. I did this by hacking dtc to dump them. Or as a starting point
to create YAML based DT binding schema. I wonder how Grant is coming
along with that.

Rob