[linux-sunxi] [ANNOUNCE] sunxi-babelfish (FEX-to-DT translator)

[maxime.ripard@free-electrons.com (Maxime Ripard)]

On Wed, Jan 08, 2014 at 04:55:37PM +0000, Ian Campbell wrote:
> On Tue, 2014-01-07 at 23:03 +0100, Maxime Ripard wrote:
> > Another nice thing about it is that a FEX-to-DT compiler comes at no
> > cost afterwards. Since dtc is able to generate a DTS from
> > /proc/device-tree, you can easily generate a DTS for your previously
> > non-supported board using
> > 
> >   dtc -I fs -O dts -o my-board.dts /proc/device-tree/
> 
> I wonder if it might also be useful to compile this as a normal user
> space application which takes the fex and produces the dtb (or dts)?

At the moment, no, libfdt only operates on DTB, so we would have to
chain this somehow with dtc to at least do the DTB to DTS conversion I
guess.

It's not something that I'm pretty fond of either. Or, I don't really
see the benefit of it.

Let's say that you have such tool, I'm guessing one would want it to
mass-convert fex files to DT. But then, you'd still have to boot that
DT to be sure that everything is working, so you're pretty much losing
the mass-convertion thing, since you would have boot this with a
baremetal babelfish anyway.

> I suppose producing something upstreamable would be different/harder
> though, since it would need to not inline/merge the dtsi file but just
> leave the include stmt. That's probably a different tool.

Yeah, dtc outputs a "flat" DTS, without any include, so you still need
to edit it by hand to remove the common part, remove the duplicated
pinctrl nodes, fix the phandle, etc.

But most of that can be scripted I guess.

-- 
Maxime Ripard, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com
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