[U-Boot-Users] [PATCH] fdt: Add simple alias support to fdt print command

[Kumar Gala <galak@kernel.crashing.org>]

On Jul 9, 2008, at 10:17 AM, Jerry Van Baren wrote:

> Kumar Gala wrote:
>> If the path we are trying to print doesn't exist see if it matches an
>> aliases.  We don't do anything fancy at this point, but just strip  
>> the
>> leading '/' if it exists and see if we have an exact match to an  
>> alias.
>> In the future we could try and prefix matching so the alias could  
>> be used
>> as a shorter path reference.
>> Signed-off-by: Kumar Gala <galak@kernel.crashing.org>
>
> Cool and useful too.  Out of curiousity, does "real" Open Firmware  
> do this sort of thing with aliases?

I'm pretty sure it the Apple OF implementation does.  However I dont  
remember to what extent it does from my playing around with OF on  
Apple HW.

> One reservation I have (which may disappear if the answer to the  
> previous question is "yes"), it automatically and silently  
> dereferences the /aliases/X node when asked to display /X or X (but  
> only if /X doesn't exist in the dtb).  This is not an obvious  
> behavior since X isn't real.

we could print out something about using an alias so the user knows  
that its happening.

> Should we have a different display syntax to force the dereference  
> of an alias X?  Assuming "*" is a good choice, this would change the  
> behavior
>  fdt print *ethernet0
> to dereference /aliases/ethernet0 and print out
>  /soc8360 at e0000000/.../enet0 (or whatever).


Lets says I have an alias for 'soc' to 'soc8360 at e000000'.  I want to  
be able to in the future do print /soc/enet0 and have that work.   
Introducing some new syntax would make that difficult and more ugly.

- k