On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 3:40 AM, Niels de Vos <devos@fedoraproject.org> wrote:

On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 11:55:00PM -0500, Jon Masters wrote:
> Hey everyone,
>
> What would you like my next talk to be on? I will do a hardware debug
> session soon, but meanwhile I am open to suggestions for the topic after
> this week - this week John Dulaney is talking about Chromebooks!

A talk about device-tree would be cool. An into with how to use/load
a device-tree blob and extending into explaining how the plain-text
files converted in to blobs cause the kernel to load certain drivers and
how these drivers know what pins/memory/options/... to use.

This is a great idea.

Here are some of my thought to add along with Niels':

* Building the DTB from source

** make some changes if you want

* loaded DTB

** Selecting a safe load addr

** What needs to be doen in u-boot to support loading DTB

* Appended DTB

** Why this is bad

** Why this is good

** example of making an appended DTB and booting.

* FIT images (chromebook)

** mkimage -f

** the dtc utility

* /proc/device-tree

** A guided tour of this new area of /proc

** how it can be used, it's purpose (besides proving the DTB is loaded and working).

It would be great to show the audience some use of Device Tree that help them at a personal level, besides being able to boot their device.

For example, I believe the Pandaboard was used as an example early on of how to use DTB to set a persistent mac address.

I'm not sure there are any other things the audience might ever want to customize in their DT, but it would be nice to share as many as possible.