From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: michael.hudson@linaro.org (Michael Hudson-Doyle) Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2014 10:05:05 +1300 Subject: [RFC] ARM VM System Sepcification In-Reply-To: <20140226183454.GA14639@cbox> References: <20140226183454.GA14639@cbox> Message-ID: <87k3chh9fi.fsf@canonical.com> To: linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org List-Id: linux-arm-kernel.lists.infradead.org Christoffer Dall writes: > Hardware Description > -------------------- > The Linux kernel's proper entry point always takes a pointer to an FDT, > regardless of the boot mechanism, firmware, and hardware description > method. Even on real hardware which only supports ACPI and UEFI, the kernel > entry point will still receive a pointer to a simple FDT, generated by > the Linux kernel UEFI stub, containing a pointer to the UEFI system > table. The kernel can then discover ACPI from the system tables. The > presence of ACPI vs. FDT is therefore always itself discoverable, > through the FDT. > > Therefore, the VM implementation must provide through its UEFI > implementation, either: > > a complete FDT which describes the entire VM system and will boot > mainline kernels driven by device tree alone, or > > no FDT. In this case, the VM implementation must provide ACPI, and > the OS must be able to locate the ACPI root pointer through the UEFI > system table. Maybe I'm missing something, but should this last bit say "a trivial FDT" instead of "no FDT"? If not, I don't understand the first paragraph :-) Cheers, mwh