Re: [PATCH RFC 0/5] Split off mini-os to a separate tree

[Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@citrix.com>]

On Tue, 2015-01-27 at 15:27 +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Ian Campbell writes ("Re: [PATCH RFC 0/5] Split off mini-os to a separate tree"):
> > On Tue, 2015-01-27 at 14:48 +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > > libdft is its own project.  I have no idea why we have a copy of it in
> > > xen.git.  I think this is wrong.
> > 
> > This is for use by (i.e. linking into) the Xen kernel, not the tools
> > etc. It's common to embed libfdt in this way for kernel uses, since we
> > can't really use link against libfdt.so (or even .a) like you would
> > normally.
> 
> That doesn't explain why we don't clone a copy of the upstream tree
> during build, like we do for other projects we depend on (rather than
> copying the whole thing into our own tree).

The xen/* subtree doesn't do that for anything, it builds standalone. I
don't think you will get much traction from the hypervisor maintainers
on changing that.

Anyway, embedding is how libfdt is intended to be consumed by things
like OS kernels and bootloaders.

> I think that the former is what Mini-OS consumers should be expected
> to do (perhaps with some help from the Mini-OS build system).

If this were a peripheral library used for e.g. application layer stuff
I might agree, however this is a core underlying part of the mini-os ARM
port, IMHO it makes sense to continue to embed it in mini-os for the
same reasons it does for Xen, Linux, u-boot, *BSD etc to continue to do
so.

Ian.