Re: [PATCH v4 2/8] OF: Introduce DT overlay support.

[Geert Uytterhoeven]

Hi Grant,

On Mon, May 26, 2014 at 12:48 PM, Grant Likely
<grant.likely@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, 20 May 2014 09:38:49 +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 7:50 AM, Grant Likely <grant.likely@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> >> Why has the overlay system been designed for plugging and unpluging whole
>> >> overlays?
>> >> That means the kernel has to remember the full stack, causing issues with
>> >> e.g. kexec.
>> >
>> > Mostly so that drivers don't see any difference in the livetree data
>> > structure. It also means that userspace sees a single representation of
>> > the hardware at any given time.
>>
>> Sorry, I don't follow the argument about the "single representation of the
>> hardware".
>
> Er, s/of the hardware/of the tree/. Right now the overlay design
> modifies the live tree which at the same time modifies the tree
> representation in /sys/firmware/devicetree. If the design was changed to
> keep the overlay logically separate, then I would think we want to
> expose that information to usespace also. In fact, I think we would need
> to for usecases like kexec.

OK, so it does modify the real tree, and doesn't keep the actual overlays.

I was under the impression the overlay stack was also kept in memory, to allow
reversal, so there was a misunderstanding.

Hence for kexec, the tree in /sys/firmware/devicetree can just be passed
to the new kernel, as that's the current representation of the hardware?

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds
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