Subject: Re: [PATCH] Update udbg_progress() to display the integer

From: Timur Tabi <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2007 17:42:45 -0600

Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
>> It would have been for the 2-line display on IBM RS/6000 machines.  If
>> that's still needed, we can put it in arch/powerpc/platforms/chrp
>> somewhere, so feel free to remove it from ppc_init().
> 
> Do we actually care about this progress stuff ? 

I think support for LED progress displays is a nice feature to have.

The only reason I noticed it is because on Freescale boards, it's the only way 
to get printk-like functionality early in the boot process.

> I've been tempted more
> than once to rip it all off... we have console access as early as we can
> do progress output on most powerpc platforms nowadays.

Is that what udbg_progress() uses?  I'm not really familiar with the early 
console stuff.

> If we really want some way of ack'ing that the kernel reached known
> known steps with something different than a printk-type interface, then
> we should probably have somewhere a list of well defined numeric
> constants and use those, but then, I don't like magic numbers.

Me neither.  I think on systems like RS6000, the progress codes have already 
been defined, so I don't think we can redefine them.

-- 
Timur Tabi
Linux Kernel Developer @ Freescale