From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list linux-mips); Tue, 23 Nov 2010 20:06:32 +0100 (CET) Received: from nbd.name ([46.4.11.11]:41512 "EHLO nbd.name" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by eddie.linux-mips.org with ESMTP id S1491930Ab0KWTGZ (ORCPT ); Tue, 23 Nov 2010 20:06:25 +0100 Message-ID: <4CEC10AE.10305@openwrt.org> Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2010 20:06:22 +0100 From: Felix Fietkau User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101027 Thunderbird/3.1.6 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Gabor Juhos CC: Arnaud Lacombe , Ralf Baechle , linux-mips@linux-mips.org, kaloz@openwrt.org, "Luis R. Rodriguez" , Cliff Holden Subject: Re: [PATCH 03/18] MIPS: add generic support for multiple machines within a single kernel References: <1290524800-21419-1-git-send-email-juhosg@openwrt.org> <1290524800-21419-4-git-send-email-juhosg@openwrt.org> <4CEC0D1C.7090605@openwrt.org> In-Reply-To: <4CEC0D1C.7090605@openwrt.org> X-Enigmail-Version: 1.1.1 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-Path: X-Envelope-To: <"|/home/ecartis/ecartis -s linux-mips"> (uid 0) X-Orcpt: rfc822;linux-mips@linux-mips.org Original-Recipient: rfc822;linux-mips@linux-mips.org X-archive-position: 28499 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: linux-mips-bounce@linux-mips.org Errors-to: linux-mips-bounce@linux-mips.org X-original-sender: nbd@openwrt.org Precedence: bulk X-list: linux-mips On 2010-11-23 7:51 PM, Gabor Juhos wrote: > Hi Arnaud, > >> On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 10:06 AM, Gabor Juhos wrote: >>> This patch adds a generic solution to support multiple machines based on >>> a given SoC within a single kernel image. It is implemented already for >>> several other architectures but MIPS has no generic support for that yet. >>> >> Is this the way `arch/mips' wants to go to support multiple machine >> within a same kernel image ? > > I don't know yet what will be the chosen way. > >> Flattened Device Tree is the other way to achieve that. I remind the latter >> being proposed by Felix Fietkau on #openwrt. > > FDT makes sense when the bootloader supports that. FDT makes sense when the > bootloader supports that, but i'm not aware of any AR71xx/AR724x/AR913x based > board which has such bootloader. Additionally, the device-tree support for MIPS > has been added only recently and none of the existing MIPS boards are using that > yet AFAIK. If that will be widely used we can consider to switch to that later. We don't need boot loader support, we can make a simple loader stub that passes the FDT data to the kernel. It would certainly be better than our current cmdline hack ;) I think using FDT would save us a lot of maintenance work, as we wouldn't have to change the kernel for every single new board that we add support for. - Felix