RFC: ARM Boot standard for passing device tree blob

[grant.likely@secretlab.ca (Grant Likely)]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 3:04 PM, Russell King - ARM Linux
<linux@arm.linux.org.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 09:11:56AM -0600, Grant Likely wrote:
>> ===Required System State===
>> *Quiesce all DMA
>> *CPU register contents
>> **r0 = 0
>> **r1 = Linux machine number (as defined in the ARM Linux machine database) or 0
>
> 0 is a valid machine number. ?What is your purpose of passing 0?

Heh, I forgot to go back and check if 0 was assigned or not.  I just
wanted something that wasn't going to conflict.  How about 0xffffffff
like Jeremy has been using?

>> **r2 = physical address of tagged parameter list in system RAM
>> *IRQs disabled
>> *MMU off
>> *Instruction cache either on or off
>> *Data cache turned off
>
> Would recommend saying "Data cache(s) turned off" so that L2 cache is
> included.

done.

>> ===Minimal state for Flattened Device Tree Boot===
>> For FDT booting, the tagged list only needs to contain a single device
>> tree tag, and the device tree blob could be appended to the end of the
>> tagged list so that everything resides in the same region of memory.
>
> That's a bad idea. ?Sometimes the tagged list can be extended by wrappers
> around the kernel, and data placed at the end of the list would be
> overwritten.

Fair enough, I hadn't considered that.

Currently I'm handling the tree blob the same way ramdisks are handled
and waiting until after bootmem_init() to actually access the tree.
That works for the device registration code, but I still rely on the
machine id for probing platform code.  Jeremy has patches that can do
platform probing from device tree data, but last I talked to him it
required the blob to be in the same section of memory as the atags.
ie. between PHYS_BASE and PHYS_BASE+0x4000 IIRC.

> As the tagged list can encode arbitarily sized data chunks, there's no
> reason to use a pointer in the tagged list. ?However, there is a problem:
> what do you do with a large chunk of data in the tagged list? ?You can't
> allocate memory to copy it in the kernel because no memory allocators
> are up and running...
>
> That's always been the catch-22 with passing binary data blobs to the
> kernel.

Indeed.  Another option I suppose is to extract the needed data from
the tree as part of the wrapper and squirt it into atags.  Then there
would be no problem in waiting until bootmem_init() to reserve the
devicetree memory.

Cheers,
g.

-- 
Grant Likely, B.Sc., P.Eng.
Secret Lab Technologies Ltd.