Re: [RFC 7/8] fpga-region: add sysfs interface

[Jason Gunthorpe]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 11:47:08AM -0600, Alan Tull wrote:

> > Just to clarify: I was proposing using the binary format of dts,
> > not actually requiring devicetree for it to work. There's plenty
> > of people running u-boot on x86 using FIT images to boot.
> 
> The FPGA images should not be required to have OS specific parts.
> Some ahem non-Linux OS's that use FPGAs don't use device tree, so that
> adds an extra complication for them unnecessarily.

Not just that, but we parse the bitfile headers in user space as well.

Requiring people to use libfdt pretty much kills the idea because of
its GPL license.

As I've shown the plain text headers can be produced in a scripting
langauge, and are trivially consumed without much trouble. IHMO this
makes it more likely there would be adoption..

Jason