[U-Boot-Users] Pull request: u-boot-freebsd

[Haavard Skinnemoen]

On Wed, 19 Dec 2007 00:00:09 +0100
Rafal Jaworowski <raj at semihalf.com> wrote:

> Haavard Skinnemoen wrote:
> > I agree, but I thought exporting u-boot's hardware knowledge was the
> > whole point of the Device Tree (libfdt) stuff?
> > 
> 
> Well, not all U-Boot platforms use the device tree abstraction: it's only
> PowerPC+Linux combination. MIPS, ARM and other archs don't use it, operating
> systems other than Linux, to name only *BSD and VxWorks, similar.

True, but wouldn't it make more sense to try to unify this rather than
adding another interface?

> > It's not that I'm really objecting to the new interface -- it does seem
> > to be more well-designed than the old jumptable stuff -- but it's just
> > that I don't understand why you need this functionality in the first
> > place, just to be able to boot an OS. When you have a kernel image as
> > well as possibly other related images loaded into memory, along with a
> > device tree providing detailed information about the hardware, why do
> > you need a syscall interface on top of everything?
> > 
> 
> Let me try to summarize the FreeBSD booting approach:

<snip>

> Hope that helped explain the scenario a bit.

It did. Thanks.

Haavard