freebsd announce - Oct 2009 - Flattened Device Tree Project Announcement

Dear FreeBSD Community,

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce another funded project!

Rafal Jaworowski and Semihalf has been awarded a grant to provide 
FreeBSD with support for the flattened device tree (FDT) technology. 
This project allows for describing hardware resources of a computer 
system and their dependencies in a platform-neutral and portable way.

The main consumers of this functionality are embedded systems whose
hardware resources assignment cannot be probed or self-discovered.

The FDT idea is inherited from Open Firmware IEEE 1275 device-tree
notion (part of the regular Open Firmware implementation), and among
other deployments is used as a basis for Power.org's embedded platform
reference specification (ePAPR).

"Thanks to this project, embedded FreeBSD platforms will grow in a
uniform and extensible way of representing hardware devices, compliant
with industry standards (ePAPR, Open Firmware), independent of
architecture and platform (portable across ARM, MIPS, PowerPC etc.),"
said Rafal Jaworoski, FreeBSD Developer.

Semihalf is a privately owned company, based in Krakow, Poland. They 
specialize in embedded systems design and development, with expertise in 
both software and hardware. Among their portfolio are FreeBSD ports to 
high-end embedded processors (including multi-core) with a wide range of 
peripheral drivers (storage, networking, pattern matching, security 
engines etc.); most of this work is publicly available from the FreeBSD 
repository.

You can find out more about the project at 
http://wiki.freebsd.org/FlattenedDeviceTree.

This project will complete by February 2010.


Sincerely,

The FreeBSD Foundation