[Ksummit-2013-discuss] ARM topic: Is DT on ARM the solution, or is there something better?

[Stephen Warren]

On 10/21/2013 02:00 AM, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
...
> The idea of some firmware to abstract hardware differences in order to 
> greatly simplify kernel development and maintenance comes up with some 
> regularity.  In other words, you are far from being the first one to 
> suggest that.
> 
> However this needs some reality check.
> 
> Every hardware system has its share of complexity that the software has 
> to deal with.
> 
> If that complexity is not in the kernel, it has to be in the firmware.  
> Given we already struggles to have proper and bug free hardware support 
> in the kernel today, even with all the debugging aid and peer review 
> available from the kernel community, I really don't see how you'd manage 
> to make it any less complex in some firmware implementation.

True. Hiding all the HW details sucks in some ways.

So, if we have chosen not to do that, and instead have the kernel know
all the details of the HW, then why not simply do that? What do we get
from DT that we don't get from board files? The driver complexity still
all needs to be present in the kernel.

The only thing we can move out is some of the board-specific
parameterization data. That might reduce the code-size of kernel board
files a bit (or rather, eliminate them), but taking the big picture into
account, observe that we make life a lot more difficult for distros,
since they need to get the device tree from somewhere. Distros now are
forced to work out which DTB goes with which board, or perhaps we need
to define a firmware interface to obtain the DTB and pass it to the
kernel. It'd be a lot simpler just to embed the data into the kernel. I
think we can still have a hack-free, churn-free, multi-platform kernel
without requiring DT, but by using board files.