Subject: Re: [PATCH 11/13] powerpc: Add DTS file for the Motorola PrPMC2800 platform

From: Segher Boessenkool <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 13 May 2007 16:45:51 +0200

>> Not bad at all -- it is trivial to decode _if_ you know
>> how it is encoded.  You cannot tell by looking at the
>> property data only.  What is [44 54 53 00] -- just some
>> bytes, or the integer 0x44545300, or the string "DTS"?
>> You cannot tell.
>
> OK.  I was coming from the u-boot "fdt print" command.  We do a pretty 
> good job of guessing the print format (byte/word/long/string/strings), 
> but this would fail the detection circuitry and be printed as a byte 
> array [00, 00, 00, 05, 44, 54, ...] (the default format) because it 
> takes a-priori knowledge to print it in the original input format.  
> Not quite as pretty, but NBD.

Yes, every possible way of displaying property contents
is based on heuristics, some better than others -- taking
the property name (and perhaps some other context) into
account helps a lot.  Also, hardly any property is not
an array of 32-bit ints or an array of strings.

Segher