Absurdism corner

Why?


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No, It's a parking place reserved for fat murderers who intent to kill pacman with scissors.
 
U-Boot sources:
#if CONFIG_IS_ENABLED(OF_PLATDATA)
/*
* We don't support 64-bit machines. If they are so resource-contrained that
* they need to use OF_PLATDATA, something is horribly wrong with the
* education of our hardware engineers.
*
* Update: 64-bit is now supported and we have an education crisis.
*/
Out of context source browsing is fun. They should do it on TV. Wait. I don't watch TV anyway...
 
The U-boot developers (or some, at least) think the world has an education crisis.

That education crisis is the cause of there being hardware engineers so dumb that they will build 64 bit processors so resource constrained that they can't run a device tree binary parser at runtime, and need the data to be transpiled to C structs and compiled in at build time [at least that's what I think OF_PLATDATA does, I'm not U-Boot expert]. The infrastructure was thougt for small processors or microcontrollers or whatever that didn't have enough SRAM or speed at early boot up to deal with dtbs. The U-boot authors never thought that in their future that now is past, someone will design a CPU that is able to handle 64 bit words with ease but is otherwise restricted at boot.

Using dtbs is more flexible than using platform data compiled in, because then the same code can run in slightly different hardware or the same hardware with slightly different configurations by just loading a different dtb (or more than one), like different muxer settigns to control different devices connected to it or whatever. U-boot will even include configuration data in dtbs, not just hardware description. They really want to use dtbs. So using platform data was just taken as a necessary measure in those case where they really couldn't use dtbs. When they did that they didn't take into account 64 bit processors. When they thought about it they didn't find it necessary to support that. They thought "people can't be so dumb", until they thought "how could I be so dumb to think people wouldn't be so dumb? Oh my!".
 
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