A new SUNXI evbarm kernel has appeared recently in NetBSD -current with support for boards based on the Allwinner H3 system on a chip (SoC). The H3 SoC is a quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC designed primarily for set-top boxes, but has managed to find its way into many single-board computers (SBC). This is one of the first evbarm ports built from the ground up with device tree support, which helps us to use a single kernel config to support many different boards.
The ARM devicetree conversion over on the Linux side has been working with an eye towards this sort of thing all along.
Devicetree rules specify that we represent the device, not the linux driver or data structures. Most (all?) Mainline devicetree files use a bsd compatible licence to avoid someone rewriting them (waste of effort and likely adding the same features incompatibly).
It doesn’t always work out that way as it is hard to design with that theoretic other OS in mind, when all you have in front of you is Linux, and a desire to get the device working.
So This is a great moment. DTS starting to become actually OS independent rather than just theoretically so.
Edited 2017-07-10 03:45 UTC