[U-Boot-Users] RFC: Booting the Linux/ppc64 kernel without Open Firmware HOWTO

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

On Fri, May 20, 2005 at 09:11:22AM +0200, Marius Groeger wrote:
> On Fri, 20 May 2005, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> 
> >Ok, I got some numbers here. (I have removed the page alignment
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> I think we'll just have to try all that out for ourselves. Simple 
> boards will probably be at the lower end of your figures, which 
> *should* be fine for most people.
> 
> How do you view this, though: couldn't it happen in the future, once 
> the dev-tree has been widely established, that more and more drivers 
> are converted to pull their properties off the tree, because it is so 
> convenient? That *could* lead to rising expectations toward the 
> firmware, and make what once was a small blob a big blob. Is it 
> reasonable to assume drivers will #ifdef such behaviour?

Bear in mind that if a driver chooses to take its information from the
device tree, it's presumably because the code is simpler that way.
Which means any such increase in the necessary device tree size is (at
least partially) offset by a reduction in code size..

-- 
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/people/dgibson