[PROPOSAL] enhanced table dumping

[Stefan Reinauer]

* Ronald G. Minnich <rminnich at lanl.gov> [050118 20:05]:
> > I'd like to hear more about what Stefan had in mind for the 'small set of C
> > functions'. Maybe the simplest way would be to pass the device tree itself to
> > the payload? I guess it wouldn't solve the binary/ascii problem, but it would
> > sure as hell make the code easy.
> 
> no, that will not work, due to the compiler portability issues. The Plan 9
> C compiler won't work against GCC structs in any cases where
> __attribute(xyz) has been used. We have to be careful here -- not all
> payloads are compiled with gcc.
> 
> That's why I favor the s-expression approach. Binary trees are not going 
> to work. 

What I meant is: There should be a library that people can use that
parses s-expressions or whatever is used in the end and work on this
information. So you can do foo=find-lbtable("memorymap");
Any payload will want a set of functions like this that can just be
compiled and linked. It is not about copying binary data from one edge
to another, it is about not having every LinuxBIOS application developer
looking for his favourite s-expression library and starting to look for
tags and formats. Using a very simple parser s-expressions or xml is 
perfectly fine for exchanging data. It won't have to do a lot of syntax
or semantics checking either since we can probably rely on the fact that
the table in memory was produced by another piece of code that has no
form errors.

Stefan