From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1755219AbXABDbq (ORCPT ); Mon, 1 Jan 2007 22:31:46 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1755230AbXABDbq (ORCPT ); Mon, 1 Jan 2007 22:31:46 -0500 Received: from 74-93-104-97-Washington.hfc.comcastbusiness.net ([74.93.104.97]:49410 "EHLO sunset.davemloft.net" rhost-flags-OK-FAIL-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755219AbXABDbq (ORCPT ); Mon, 1 Jan 2007 22:31:46 -0500 Date: Mon, 01 Jan 2007 19:31:44 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: <20070101.193144.74746471.davem@davemloft.net> To: segher@kernel.crashing.org Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, devel@laptop.org, dmk@flex.com, wmb@firmworks.com, hch@infradead.org, jg@laptop.org Subject: Re: [PATCH] Open Firmware device tree virtual filesystem From: David Miller In-Reply-To: References: <385664dfd55cfdfb9f9651fc90bf46b0@kernel.crashing.org> <20070101.150831.17863014.davem@davemloft.net> X-Mailer: Mew version 5.1.52 on Emacs 21.4 / Mule 5.0 (SAKAKI) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org From: Segher Boessenkool Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2007 00:52:36 +0100 > There is one big problem: text representation is useless > (to scripts etc.) unless it can be transformed back to binary; > i.e., it has to be possible to reliably detect _how_ some > property is represented into text, something that cannot be > done with how openpromfs handles it. Text is text is text for many propertiers, in particular the ones you actually end up wanting to modify. The biggest and most used example are the device aliases and the 'boot-device' and 'boot-file' environment variables. We even have a special case for that latter case on sparc via: echo 'foo.image' >/proc/sys/kernel/reboot-cmd In order for a problem to exist, you have to show counter examples where the problem triggers and something fails. What in userspace wants to modify a OFW property, which is not text? In my experience all such cases are limited to ASCII text valued properties, such as device aliases, environment variables, and things like nvramrc.