From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Mitch Bradley Subject: Mis?use of aliases Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2012 19:30:42 -1000 Message-ID: <50010402.3050502@firmworks.com> References: <1342218413-30116-1-git-send-email-jon-hunter@ti.com> <1342218413-30116-2-git-send-email-jon-hunter@ti.com> <5000D647.4090200@gmail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <5000D647.4090200-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: devicetree-discuss-bounces+gldd-devicetree-discuss=m.gmane.org-uLR06cmDAlY/bJ5BZ2RsiQ@public.gmane.org Sender: "devicetree-discuss" To: Rob Herring Cc: device-tree , linux-omap , linux-arm , Tarun Kanti DebBarma List-Id: linux-omap@vger.kernel.org > I'm not sure this is really a good use of aliases. UARTs use aliases > because it is important that the UART number to tty number is known and > fixed. This brings up an issue that I've been meaning to comment on. The use of phandle-valued properties in the aliases node causes real OFW implementations some amount of heartburn. The Open Firmware standard says that the properties in /aliases are string-valued. That's important, because aliases are shorthand for fragments of full device specifiers (pathnames that can include arguments to nodes). Phandles can point to nodes, but can't be relative, and can't encode per-node-component arguments. For binding a Linux unit number to a device node, I would prefer to decorate the node with a property like "linux,unit#", instead of breaking the standard semantics of /aliases. Mitch