common flatdevtree code

[Paul Mackerras]

Mark A. Greer writes:

> I'm doing some fairly massive rework to my patches so it'll take
> another day or two (plus 4 day weekend for me).  In the meantime,
> this is what I've done to your code.  :)

Any further progress on this?  I need an ft library for the prep
bootwrapper changes I'm planning.

I don't like the approach of doing a malloc for the whole blob every
time you make a property larger though.  I'm going to be adding quite
a few nodes and properties, potentially, and with a simple-minded
malloc (such as you get in a bootwrapper) it's likely to chew through
a lot of memory unnecessarily.  I would rather be able to start with
an existing blob and pull it apart once, add stuff to it, then put it
back together, doing a small number of mallocs in the process.

> I still plan on changing it a bit to use ft_next in a few more routines
> (e.g., ft_dump_blob).  ft_next has a clumsy interface but I like the fact

The interface might look nicer if we had a structure for the tag,
name, value and length.  Then there would only be one parameter
instead of the four you have at the moment.

Paul.