Re: [PATCH 7/7] [v2] drivers/misc: introduce Freescale hypervisor management driver

On Thursday 02 June 2011, Scott Wood wrote:

I wanted to have the hypervisor take an update dtb (we already have special
meta-properties for things like deletion as part of the hv config
mechanism).  But others on the project wanted to keep it simple, and so
get/set property it was. :-/

It's unlikely to change at this point without a real need.

As for a filesystem interface, it's not a good match either. 
You can't iterate over anything to read out the full tree from the hv.

kexec iterates over /proc/device-tree to create a dts blob.

You can't delete anything. 

rm, rmdir

You can't create empty nodes.

mkdir

The hv interface was meant to enable some specific management actions,
rather than to provide general device tree access.  This driver is a thin
wrapper around the management hcalls.

A file system would be a slightly more abstract interface to do the
same thing, I gues.

There would still be other ioctls needed for starting/stopping the
partition, etc.

Right, although you could model them as a file interface as well.
KVMfs is one example doing that.

	Arnd