Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News

Zack Brown reports on communicating with Linux during bootup, pruning SuperH, and bug hunting for Stea.
Communicating with Linux During Bootup
The open source development model is geared to maximize everyone's contribution with the two assumptions: If you need something, it's probably a good idea to implement it, and if you implement it, there are probably other developers interested in helping you get your patch into an acceptable state. So the amount of wasted work is probably very low, though I'm not sure how to measure that precisely.
It's definitely the case that sometimes you can put in a lot of work, only to discover that other developers are simply opposed to whatever it is that you need.
Masami Hiramatsu recently tried to extend DeviceTree to pass debugging configuration information into the kernel. This could also be done on the kernel command line, but as Masami himself pointed out, "the kernel command line is a command line." It's not the ideal format for passing structured data.
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