Re: Mikrotik RouterBoard 333

[David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 02:17:36AM +0200, Segher Boessenkool wrote:
>> Its firmware apparently provides a flattened device tree to the OS.
>> And while this step towards world domination is flattering, it's an
>> example of what I feared when people first got enthusiastic about the
>> idea of including flattened device trees in firmwares.  The tree has
>> not, AFAIK, been past this list, and has apparently not been reviewed
>> by someone knowledgeable about device trees.  In short, it's crap, and
>> now that it's embedded in the firware we can't really fix it.
>
> Can't you build a kernel with a blob that overrides the
> firmware-provided blob?

Sorry, my phrasing was slightly unclear.  Certainly we can work around
a firmware with a crap device tree by replacing it, if necessary.
Basically that's just treating the firmware as though it's one of
these old-style jobs which provides its tiny handful of necessary bits
of information (memory size, maybe a few others) in a format that
happens to resemble a device tree.

But it seems kind of silly for firmware to go to the trouble of
providing a device tree just for us to ignore it and substitute our
own.

-- 
David Gibson			| I'll have my music baroque, and my code
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au	| minimalist, thank you.  NOT _the_ _other_
				| _way_ _around_!
http://www.ozlabs.org/~dgibson