Re: I2C and devicetrees

Hi,

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 5:34 PM, Gerlando Falauto
[off-list ref] wrote:

Hi everyone,

I have a similar question.
I'd like to "name" i2c devices so that a userspace application can somehow
identify those devices with the same function across different boards (which
may have different addresses or be connected to a different i2c bus, or be a
physically different chip).

For instance "hwmon" devices get instantiated within sysfs under
/sys/class/hwmon/hwmonX

# cat /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon0/device/name
lm75

which I would like to be identified by the name "switch" (as in "switch
temperature"). I was thinking about instantiating it as something like
"lm75:switch" within i2c_board_info.type. For device-tree-less
architectures, a trivial change within i2c_match_id() so to ignore the part
following ":" seems to do the trick. Don't know about devicetree but I guess
a similar approach could be imagined.

Another example would be given by EEPROMs: all boards are equipped with an
EEPROM containing inventory management, which I would like to identify as
"ivm". So something like "24c08:ivm".
After all, I'd like to be able to achive something like "named MTD
partitions" which you can identify by looking at "/proc/mtd".

Maybe some other symbol could be used instead of ":", but anyhow, does the
above make any sense at all to you?

I have exactly the same request: I would like to put logical names in
the device tree for various devices (i2c, spi, ...) which are in some
way easily retrievable from a userspace application.
The purpose seems to be the same as Gerlando's: different boards have
different physical configuration but logically each has the same set
of devices.

How can one achieve that?

Thanks,
Thomas