On Wed, 10 Dec 2014, Rafał Miłecki wrote:

After Broadcom switched from MIPS to ARM for their home routers we need
to have NVRAM driver in some common place (not arch/mips/).
We were thinking about putting it in bus directory, however there are
two possible buses for MIPS: drivers/ssb/ and drivers/bcma/. So this
won't fit there neither.
This is why I would like to move this driver to the drivers/firmware/

Signed-off-by: Rafał Miłecki <zajec5@gmail.com>
---
Hey, this is another try for the NVRAM driver. At first I tried moving it to the
drivers/misc/, but then decided drivers/soc/ will be better. Then after
discussion with Paul we decided to try drivers/firmware/ and so I do.

Meanwhile I've sent few patches cleaning nvram.c: following kernel coding style
and using helpers like readl.

I would like to get few Reviewed-by for this patch. If I get that, then I'll
re-send this patch to Ralf without the RFC.

If you want to review nvram.c code, please make sure to check version in
ralf/upstream-sfr.git repository as it contains many cleanups:
git://git.linux-mips.org/pub/scm/ralf/upstream-sfr.git
http://git.linux-mips.org/cgit/ralf/upstream-sfr.git/log/

Mentioned patches (more cleanups):
http://patchwork.linux-mips.org/project/linux-mips/list/?submitter=478

Finally: why drivers/firmware/? Please see Paul's e-mail:
[ref]
http://www.linux-mips.org/archives/linux-mips/2014-11/msg00678.html

Unfortunately there is no mailing list for drivers/firmware/, so I've
picked ppl with 5+ commits to this directory. Hope this is OK.

Reviewed-by: Paul Walmsley <paul@pwsan.com>

Just to restate, if it's unclear for any other reviewers (as it initially 
was for me): this isn't an NVRAM driver as most folks understand the term.  
This "NVRAM" code parses SoC configuration data that is passed to the 
kernel in flash from the bootloader firmware, "CFE".


- Paul