hw description

Table of Contents HW Description Problems Potential solutions Others interested in this problem?

HW Description

Problems

• Need to communicate HW details (addresses, topologies, …) to SW subsystems during build
  • Both at system level (complete HW including all CPUs) and subsystem level
  • Tool to create subsystems with assigned devices out of system level info
• Need to communicate HW details during runtime
  • Device trees used by Linux, Xen, etc.
  • How to communicate to coprocessors (remoteproc) what devices it has?
• Need tools to create static config data (#defines, .h, .c files) from HW description
  • Zephyr working on this. Need general solution.
• Need compact format for runtime use cases
  • DTB is not very compact. Using strings instead of labels, no compression

Potential solutions

• Come up with standard, humanly readable, HW description format for usage during build
  • Possible candidates include extended Device Trees, IPExact, …
  • A “System Level Device Tree” would add another level with multiple CPUs and mappings
• Come up with standard compressed HW description
  • Potential candidate is CBOR

Others interested in this problem?