We've discussed device tree overlays and the BBB's 'capemgr' at length here previously, so I was interested to see that Pantelis is having another go at getting these into tha mainline kernel here http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.devicetree/50851 It's almost a year since the last attempt (essentially what we have in current BBB kernels), so no surprise that things have changed around quite a bit.
What seems to be of most interest is that the control of it via the 'slots' file buried under /sys seems to have vanished and been replaced with:
cat ~/BB-UART2-00A0.dtbo >/proc/device-tree-overlay
where you're actually sending the file itself instead of a name which capemgr then converts to a filename and asks the kernel firmware loader to load for you.
The good thing is that this makes for a much more generally useful facility, it's not BBB specific anymore.
The downside is that it seems likely that the current examples posted here and shabaz excellent blog posts will become obsolete to some degree.
It's obviously just a first step, I'd imagine there's some sort of BBB capemgr to come, but I'm wondering if it could actually end up being a userspace app. Time will no doubt tell. I'd also think that it will be at least six months before this would make it into mainline, so plenty of time for things to change..
