Going from 2.2.12 to 2.2.17pre10

Benjamin Herrenschmidt bh40 at calva.net
Tue Jul 11 20:17:14 EST 2000


>
>Residual data is useful for things like finding the memory size, and for
>chips designed inside Apple. For almost everything else Linux already
>contains a device tree, built by PCI probing when the kernel boots^*. I
>don't see much need for a parallel, architecture specific, device tree.

In the case of Apple HW, the OF device tree is the only way to know about:

 - Interrupt routing & sense type (level/edge)
 - Machine model (for the machine device-specific stuffs we have)
 - Bits inside Apple ASICs (we could hard code everything, but that doesn't
   sound like a good idea, and the device tree also provide things like the
   MAC address of the eth chip)
 - Firmware boot path (to setup the OF boot and configure the bootloader)
 - PCI hierarchy with the Uni-N chip
 - Memory size (of course)
 - What else did I forget ?


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