[PATCH 5/6] OF: Introduce Device Tree resolve support.

[Pantelis Antoniou]

Hi Grant,

On Mar 16, 2013, at 11:24 AM, Grant Likely wrote:

> On Wed, 23 Jan 2013 12:58:02 +0200, Pantelis Antoniou <panto at antoniou-consulting.com> wrote:
>> Hi David,
>> 
>> On Jan 23, 2013, at 6:40 AM, David Gibson wrote:
>>> Ok.  Nonetheless it's not hard to avoid a recursive approach here.
>> 
>> How can I find the maximum phandle value of a subtree without using recursion.
>> Note that the whole function is just 6 lines long.
> 
> It's a failure in the existing kernel DT data structures. We need a hash
> lookup for the phandles to eliminate the search entirely. Then you'd be
> able to allocated new phandles on the fly easily and resolve phandles
> without searching the whole tree (which has always been horrible).
> 

Yes, it is pretty obvious that the in-kernel data structures are sub-optimal.
But I was not after modifying them, since that's a different kind of problem.

Since we're having a 'sub-optimal' data structures, I'd like to point out that
the usage of of_find_by_name(), mostly by drivers trying to find a child
of their own node, works by a lucky accident of how the device nodes are instantiated
by the flat tree loader. Most of the use cases should be replaced by a call
to of_get_child_by_name() which does the right thing.

> That said, I'd like to punt on the whole phandle resolution thing. The
> DT overlay support can be merged without the phandle resolution support
> if the core rejects any overlays with phandle collisions.
> 


Fair enough, but be warned that phandle resolution the overlay feature is mostly useless.

In actual practice the amount of driver nodes that can be overlaid without a single case
of referencing phandles outside (or within) their own blob is close to zero.

> g.

Regards

-- Pantelis