[PATCH 0/3] patches to allow DTB to be appended to the ARM zImage

[Shawn Guo]

On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 10:52:17AM +0100, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 05:38:23PM +0800, Shawn Guo wrote:
> > On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 10:21:31AM +0100, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> > > What if your platform doesn't use uboot?
> > 
> > Add dtb parsing support with the help from libfdt, I guess.  It is
> > some amount of work, but it's not a rewrite of bootloader, IMHO.
> 
> I guess you're suggesting that this wrapper uses libfdt to merge
> the ATAGs with the DT info?
> 
No, ATAGs does not play at all in this case.  For u-boot example
again, if it boots a dt kernel, dtb will be parsed to get cmdline
node overwritten as bootargs env value, and then it boots the dt
kernel with this updated dtb.

> I think this is getting messy - and I think that we've made a design
> error with the boot process in thinking that we'll have either ATAGs
> _or_ DT.  While we can continue to stuff the early kernel parts like
> decompressors and such like with this stuff, it's getting painful and
> over complicated.
> 
> It would have been far better to have passed both the ATAGs _and_ DT
> to the kernel directly and let it sort them out without having to
> teach several layers about DT parsing.
> 

-- 
Regards,
Shawn