On Tue, Sep 06, 2011 at 01:04:30PM +0100, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:

Pros to platform driver name:
1. Can re-use existing names if feature compatible without driver mods.
2. Scales well with an increasing number of SoCs.

Cons:
1. People will hate having SoC names which don't refer to their exact SoC.
2. Probably requires storage of a set of flags in driver private data
   to identify SoC specific features.
3. Requires additional string space to identify each driver name.

There's also an issue with actually getting the devices together to
register which causes fragility here.

However, thinking about this more wrt DT, there's another aspect to this.
Rather than encoding into the driver "this SoC has features and quirks
X,Y,Z" maybe that information should be in the device tree itself.  For
example, SoC 1 has X and Z, SoC 2 has Y.  Then a new SoC 3 comes along
with X and Y but not Z.  If X, Y, Z are encoded into DT then there's no
need to touch the kernel to support SoC 3, not even to change driver
names or soc_is_xxx macros etc.

This does depend pretty strongly on making sure that the SoC DT is
distributed separately to the board DT - that should be solved now.