[U-Boot] [PATCH 3/8] boottime: Add core boottime measurement support

Wolfgang Denk
2012-11-21T16:14:17Z

Dear Lee Jones,

In message <20121121150332.GC28899@gmail.com> you wrote:
>
> > Neither ATAGS not the device tree are intended nor designed for
> > passing logfile information. Yes, you can use them like that, and it
> > will actually work.
>
> ATAGs were exactly designed for this type of thing. To pass small
> data structures though to the kernel. In our case, our trace-points
> are held in a small data structure. They're not logs.

You appear to have a specific definition of log data in mind. It must
be different to mine.

Also, you contradict yourself - here you write "pass small data
structures", earlier you wrote about "lots of trace-points", which
sounds as if the total amount of data would be not exactly small -
actually so big that yu are afraid of annoying users with it.

Anyway. This doesn't take us further.

> They're not poor augments if the data stored isn't log messages,
> which these aren't. If anything I would say that ramming them in as
> textual kernel messages, then parsing the log text using a userspace
> tool was an abuse of the system. If we create them as data in the
> bootloader, then pass them to the kernel as data, then process them
> as data, _that_ would be the correct mechanism.

Well, I could pooint out here a number of pretty basic design
decisions made earlier in a number of pretty important and successful
software projects, like the fact that a large number of internet
protocols are based on plain text implementations. Or how useful it
is if you can just to a post-mortem dump of the log buffer and
actually _read_ the entries, without need to special tools.

I think I should stop here, though. It appears it makes little sense
trying to discuss alternative approaches when you have already fixed
your mind about the one and only "correct" way to do this.

To summarize: NAK.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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