[PROPOSAL] enhanced table dumping

[Greg Watson]

On Jan 18, 2005, at 4:51 AM, Eric W. Biederman wrote:

> Stefan Reinauer <stepan at openbios.org> writes:
>
>> * ACPI tables need information on the Apics as well. Now the ACPI
>>   implementation I wrote a longer while ago is completely static and
>>   basically only works for systems with a single IOAPIC and not very
>>   well even on those.
>>
>> Autocreation of those tables should belong to the driver code of each
>> supported device.
>
> No.  The devices should have no idea about the format of the data
> we present to the user.  We should push all of the information into
> the device tree so we can derive it from there.

I agree. The right way to do this is to provide the device tree with a 
single method for serializing itself. If ACPI, MP, pirq information 
needs to be passed, then it should be included in the device tree. We 
may need to add additional device tree information to deal with the 
IOAPICs problem.

The only issue really is what format to use for serialization. I'm 
leaning towards s-expressions for use with openbios. However, it's 
conceivable that different serialzation methods could be provided for 
different payloads, though probably not desirable.

Greg