Hi Walter,

I found your patch from last year and gave it try recently.  It is not 
creating the overlay quite like my working overlays.  It seems to 
splitting the hps_bridges interfaces, but I have not dug too deeply into
it.  I made a quick hack to support generating a target-path with string
rather than target entry with a phandle.  No symbols section is needed 
with target-path as well.

Matthew Gerlach

On Thu, 9 Jun 2016, Walter Goossens wrote:

> Hi Matthew,
> 
> On 06/08/2016 11:56 PM, mgerlach wrote:
> > Hi Everyone,
> >
> > This discussion of creating device trees especially in the context of
> > upgrading linux is extremely relevant.  I have experienced my fair of pain
> > debugging device trees during kernel upgrades, and this pain is a frequent 
> > topic
> > at the various Linux conferences.  It is safe to say, this problem is not
> > unique to SOCFGPAs, but the FPGA can make the pain more acute.
> >
> > As some background, sopc2dts is an Open Source tool that can help make 
> > device
> > trees based on a FPGA designs described in a "sopcinfo" file produced by
> > Altera design tools.  Sopc2dts predates SOCFPGAs and was created by
> > Walter Goossen originally for Linux running on Nios-II.  Sopc2dts can
> > also be used to make device trees for SOCFPGAs, but as many folks have 
> > pointed out, the output of sopc2dts does not always produce suitable 
> > device
> > trees for every version of the Linux kernel.
> >
> > The SoC Embedded Development Suite (SoCEDS) includes a snapshot of 
> > sopc2dts and
> > a set of "board info" files that can be used to create device trees for 
> > the
> > the reference designs using the kernel version shipped with that version 
> > of SoCEDS.  Version 16.0 of SoCEDS shipped with linux-3.10-ltsi.
> >
> > When upgrading kernels, the process people have described by taking the 
> > base
> > device tree found in the kernel version's source tree and merging it with
> > the FPGA portion of the output to Sopc2dts is a perfectly reasonable work
> > flow.  Interestingly, this work flow has similarities to using dynamic
> > device tree overlays in the boot flow.  
> >
> > With dynamic device tree overlays, Linux could boot using the minimum 
> > device 
> > tree to get to user space. Once in user space, one or more overlays could 
> > be 
> > applied to the live device tree in order to enable more components on the 
> > SoC,
> > program the FPGA, and instantiate necessary drivers for components in the 
> > FPGA.
> > I think such a boot flow would be easier to debug and provide substantial 
> > flexibility to manage the overall boot flow.  I would like to hear what 
> > other folks think about using dynamic device tree overlays.
> 
> I also think overlays are the way to go. I actually posted a patch to
> sopc2dts a year ago with initial support for this. I currently have no
> active projects in which I can easily try this, but if you or anyone
> else has the time to look at it that would be awesome.
> I'll attach the patch to this mail as well. I haven't tested it but it
> still applies and nothing much has changed in the last year so I think
> we should be good.
> Let me know what you think!
> 
> Walter
> 
> > Matthew Gerlach
> >
> 
> 
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