[U-Boot-Users] use of aliases in device trees

[Kumar Gala]

In some discussion on the u-boot dev list it became clear that having  
aliases in the device tree might be useful as a common way to deal  
with finding specific nodes that need fixing up by the firmware.   
This problem also exists in the kernel bootwrappers.

The common example is how to associate a given MAC address with the  
proper ethernet node.  In u-boot an explicit path is hard coded into  
the u-boot build for each ethernet device.  In the bootwrapper we use  
"linux,network-index = <N>" in the given ethernet node.

One common solution would be having a top level aliases like the pmac  
tree's have:

aliases {
	enet0 = "...";
	enet1 = "...";
	pci0 = "...";
	pci1 = "...";
};

I wanted to see what people think of this idea and about trying to  
use common names for the aliases?  If nothing else I believe we will  
look at doing this on the FSL boards/parts.

- k