Re: [PATCH v4 19/21] drivers/of: Support adding sub-tree

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>]

On Sat, 2015-05-02 at 09:29 +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:

> Looking a bit more at it, I don't quite see how I can attach a subtree
> using that stuff.
> 
> Instead, each node in the overlay seems to need extra nodes and
> properties to refer to the original.
> 
> So the FW would essentially have to create something a lot more complex
> than just reflattening a bit of its internal tree. For each internal
> node, it will need to add all those __overlay__ nodes and properties.
> 
> That is not going to fly for me at all. It's order of magnitudes more
> complex than the solution we are pursuing.
> 
> So I think for our use case, we should continue in the direction of
> having a helper to unflatten a piece of FDT underneath an existing
> node. I don't like the "HYBRID" stuff though, we should not refer to
> the original FDT, we should just make them normal dynamic nodes.

A bit more thought... if we were to use the overlay stuff, Gavin, what
we *could* do is add to OPAL FW internal representation a generation
count to every node and property.

That way we could essentially know whenever something's changed from
what we flattened originally for the kernel.

We can then create a generic (not PCI specific) call that generates
an overlay tree for every node and property that has a generation
count that is newer than what was flattened (or passed by the OS).

It's still a LOT more complex than what we need though...

Cheers,
Ben.