Re: [RFC PATCH 0/4] generic loader FDT support (for direct Xen boot)

[Alex Bennée]

Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> writes:

> On Mon, 12 Oct 2020 at 17:19, Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org> wrote:
>> So the real question is are there any other -devices that we want to be
>> able to graft FDT entries on or is the generic loader enough of a
>> special case that we keep all the logic in there?
>
> To my mind the point of the generic loader is exactly that
> it is not a special case. It works exactly the same way
> for every board, for every architecture. It shouldn't have
> special case "this makes things work for the thing I want
> to load on these boards that all have FDT and want a
> particular change to it". We already have a loader that
> has that kind of "do what I mean" behaviour (--kernel),
> and I very much do not want the generic loader device to
> go in that direction. Its whole advantage is that it is
> not that, but is just a "load the file, nothing else,
> no magic" operation.

So should we introduce a sub-classed -device guest-loader which behaves
like generic loader except that it is also aware of platform data
issues?

The other option would be to add the logic to each board that supports
dynamic platform data. It would keep the problem bounded but also lead
to a fair amount of duplicated boiler-plate.

>
> thanks
> -- PMM


-- 
Alex Bennée