Ideas for guide content

Here are some miscellaneous ideas for content for the DT guide, and random other material as well:

• Overview
• Tools
  • compiler
  • schema checker
• Initialization
• Syntax
  • properties
  • basic types: strings, u32s, arrays
  • #<foo>-cells
  • <foo>-names
  • phandles
  • arguments
• Conventions
  • when to use vendor qualifier
• Debugging
• API
• Resources
  • Tutorials
  • papers, presentations and articles

Some specific questions (from Device-tree documentation project)

1. What is a phandle? How is it used? What rules are there for defining them? For referencing them?

2. How are #foo-cells used?

3. What are the rules for naming attributes? when should vendor qualifiers be used and when not?

4. How does device-tree interact with device instantiation - when is the device node created?, who creates it, when is the initcall called? when is the probe function called?

5. How does device-tree interact with platform/bus instantiation? Do buses instantiate their children device nodes, or does the probe routine do this?

6. what is the kernel API for interacting with device-tree? What things are parsed automatically, vs. require manual (coded) parsing?

Tim Bird (talk)

Additions:

• Accessing DT info
• Tools
  • many, many more:
  • diff
  • config from .dtc
  • create overlay from diff
  • decompile (already in dtc compiler)
  • grep
  • utils from the dtc (compiler) git repository
    • fdtdump
    • fdtget
    • fdtput
• How to make a driver more debug-able
• glossary / definitions
• device creation and driver binding ordering dependencies
• Future work in the pipeline (current state, direction, etc)
  • overlays
  • schema validation
  • static boot ordering to reduce delays due to dependencies

Frowand (talk)