Re: [PATCH 1/7] bootwrapper: Add a firmware-independent "raw" target.

On Fri, Dec 14, 2007 at 02:05:56AM -0600, Milton Miller wrote:

On Fri Dec 14 10:43:27 EST 2007,  Stephen Neuendorffer wrote:

quoted

From: Grant Likely <grant.likely at secretlab.ca>

This target produces a flat binary rather than an ELF file,
fixes the entry point at the beginning of the image, and takes
a complete device tree with no fixups needed.

The device tree must have labels on /#address-cells, the timebase
frequency, and the memory size.

Signed-off-by: Grant Likely <grant.likely at secretlab.ca>
---

You indicated in the intro in 0/ that this was not ready, and you 
didn't include your own s-o-b, but you did not put any statements to 
that effect in the header.  The intro is not copied into patchwork, 
which maintainers often use when deciding what to push.

Now on to why this should not be merged:

In addition to the above, it changes the build rules.  It tries to 
change wrapper to assemble the .dtb into a .o from a .S file, but 
doesn't set any flags to force the assembler into the right mode.  In 
contrast the linker is controlled by the .lds linker script.

In addition, the requirement for assembly labels can easily be 
eliminated.  As mentioned above, they are used for 3 properties.  With 
the existing library (in 2.6.24 and earlier), call simple_malloc_init 
with a small bss array (like BSS_STACK does to allocate stack), and 
then read the properties out of the device tree.  At that point, call 
simple_malloc_init a second time using the found memory size.   As I 
said the last time this was posted, my patches to boot from kexec 
implemented this strategy.

However, with the new libfdt, which is already in for-2.6.25, we should 
no longer need malloc() to simple read the tree.   At least that is 
what was advertised.

That's correct.  No malloc() is necessary for read-only access.

-- 
David Gibson			| I'll have my music baroque, and my code
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au	| minimalist, thank you.  NOT _the_ _other_
				| _way_ _around_!
http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson