On 06/29/12 21:45, the mail apparently from Arnd Bergmann included:

On Friday 29 June 2012, Tony Lindgren wrote:

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* Andy Green [off-list ref] [120629 03:12]:

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2. Is this really how we want to pass the board generated mac addresses
    and other dynamically generated data to the drivers that are device
    tree based?

The issue is that both these busses have an async probe, in the case
of USB stack the maintainer was not interested last year in adding
platform data.  Maybe it changed but that's my understanding.

OK, I'd like to hear Arnds comments on the #2 above too as this is
a more generic issue.

In case we have a device tree, we should just be using the USB binding
to find the specific device node, and add the property there. Then
the device driver can use of_get_mac_address() on the usb device itself.

I'm not sure what it takes to add the link for the device node in the
usb probing code, but my feeling is that it's not too hard.

Right now, USB is probed entirely without DT, so the patch is about
the best we can do.

Yes none of this was really hard the problem with more generic approach 
was getting comprehension and not auto-reject at the other subsystems. 
To be fair USB is USB and DT is Arm-specific issue.

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3. What about mac address in board-generic.c when booting panda with
    device tree?

I don't mind adapting it for that case.

Just to try to think about some alternatives, how about something like
this: This all could be a driver called soft-mac or something that does
what your patches are doing. Except then it would be completely generic
and would be able to take device names and mac addresses from platform
data or from devicetree.

That driver would be completely generic to all platforms, but be
very specific to finding the mac address of a device, as opposed to
other properties.

I suspect that if we do that, we will still need a way to bind a
device_node to a usb device for the purpose of finding other
properties, such as external regulators or clocks that are connected
to a hardwired USB device.

There's no standardized exposure of logical regulators over USB afaik so 
you won't be able to 'find' them without a VID:PID -bound specific 
driver that already knew about them.

Normally USB tends to just work because the device is expected to
be hot-pluggable anyway. If the USB device is soldered to the
board, the hardware designers can take some shortcuts

Tony's point about modularized host drivers coming in random order seems 
to be a fair one.  We don't build ehci modular so we don't care about it 
but from maintainer pov it's a legit issue.

-Andy

-- 
Andy Green | TI Landing Team Leader
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