Messages in this thread | | | From | David Mosberger <> | Date | Wed, 10 Apr 2002 12:00:07 -0700 | Subject | Re: [RFC] Generic access to firmware environment variables |
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>>>>> On Wed, 10 Apr 2002 20:42:31 +0200, Jan-Benedict Glaw <jbglaw@lug-owl.de> said:
Jan-Benedict> Hi! I've developed a driver to access environment Jan-Benedict> variables on Alpha computers from userspace through Jan-Benedict> procfs some time ago. These days, I updated the Jan-Benedict> driver. While doing this, I also looked at other Jan-Benedict> architectures; some of them also do have some kind of Jan-Benedict> environment variables in firmware:
Jan-Benedict> Alphas - SRM firmware SGI Workstations - ARCS Jan-Benedict> firmware MIPS/ITE-Boards - PMON m68k/MAC - ?? (info is Jan-Benedict> placed into a "bootinfo" struct) IA64 - (_seems_ to Jan-Benedict> know about environment...)
Jan-Benedict> They all access environment variables either by name, Jan-Benedict> or by an internally handles number. For Alpha, I've Jan-Benedict> (now) implemented both, access by name (if variable Jan-Benedict> name is known/described) and access by generic number.
Jan-Benedict> I think it would be useful to have something like this Jan-Benedict> for other architectures as well. So I'm currently Jan-Benedict> thinking about implementing a base driver (like Jan-Benedict> parport does) and additional modules to implement Jan-Benedict> machine/architecture specific access methode (like Jan-Benedict> parport_pc).
Jan-Benedict> It's easy to code, so what do you think of this?
On EFI platforms, there is /proc/efi/vars. The module was written by Matt Domsch <Matt_Domsch@Dell.com>. EFI is used on ia64 and x86 servers. Note that EFI variables can contain arbitrary binary data, not just text strings.
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