[U-Boot-Users] using a flat device tree to drive u-boot config

[André Schwarz]

Ben Warren schrieb:
> On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 10:43 AM, Scott Wood <scottwood at freescale.com> wrote:
>> Ben Warren wrote:
>>> On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 10:32 AM, Scott Wood <scottwood at freescale.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>> I find a device tree much easier to figure out than a tangled mess of
>>>> header
>>>> files, #defines, and #ifdefs...
>>> In many ways, yes.  But are you an average Joe or a Linux kernel
>>> propellerhead?
>> Is u-boot work normally done by average Joes, and does the average Joe
>> really find the preprocessor mess more intuitive than a "propellerhead"?
>>
> You know what I mean.  Some people like yourself do this for a living,
> and are involved day-to-day in its specification.  Of course it's
> intuitive to you.  For most people, getting U-boot going is one stage
> in the development process of software for an embedded device.  They
> work on it for a few weeks or months, then on something completely
> different.  A few months or years later, they come back to it.

You're absolutely right - just have a look at the vast lists of 
maintainers/contributors ... they are "average Joes" like myself. 
Realizing 2-3 projects each year should be possible without having to 
re-learn from scratch.

>> While we're at it, let's re-write u-boot in Visual Basic. :-)
> Uh, yeah.  I like the idea of a central repo for hardware info, and
> the device tree concept is good.  My point is that the syntax, while
> concise and exact, can be intimidating.  Just look at the amount of
> traffic on the mailing lists of people that don't understand what all
> the fields mean when specifying IRQs etc.  Anything we can do to make
> it less so for noobies is a good thing for everybody.
> 

Please keep in mind that WDenk is always watching if code is slowing 
things down or increasing size significantly. Improving things is very 
good - but not at the cost of size and/or speed. Configuring a board 
using a dtb usually needs far more code being present than needed.
After all it's a bootloader and not another pseudo OS.

But don't get me wrong ! The device tree is a very nice and usefuly 
thing ... for an OS.

regards,
André

> cheers,
> Ben
> 
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