Re: OCP vs. platform_device (was Marvell 64360/64340 GigE driver for MIPS and PPC....)
From: Matt Porter <mporter@kernel.crashing.org>
Date: 2004-10-08 20:42:59
On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 11:01:11AM -0700, Mark A. Greer wrote:
Moving to a wider PPC audience... Mark -- Russell King wrote:quoted
On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 12:16:43PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:quoted
On Fri, 2004-10-08 at 13:13 +0200, Ralf Baechle wrote:quoted
I was already considering to implement something like OCP for MIPS also. Since it already exists on PPC I instead would suggest to move arch/ppc/syslib/ocp.c into generic code, something like drivers/ocp/ maybe?Fine... but if you're doing that instead of extending platform_device to meet your needs, make sure you remove platform_device while you're at it and convert its users to OCP.There are a lot of users of platform devices, and this now includes virtually everything in the input layer. This would be a very large amount of work to rip out platform devices.
<snip a bunch of valid points>
quoted
So I think ripping out platform devices and throwing in something which is very different is a backwards step.
As I've mentioned a couple time now on #mklinux, we should be moving to platform_device on PPC. When I moved OCP forward from 2.4 it was because a bunch of work was done to fix it up there by BenH and the 4xx stuff had been using it for a long time before platform_device was around. There's a bunch of "backend" type info that is PPC subarch specific that is encoded in the .additions field of the OCP defs that can be moved to the platform_data field. That's really where most of the important stuff for OCP is at. We really just need somebody with time to convert all the subarches to add platform_devices and drivers to gather info from them. I may or may not have time to accomplish this myself in the near future. The point here is that I'm 100% behind converting from ocp_device to platform_device as long as whoever does it preserves the rest of the functionality (which should mostly can accomplished by moving the additions info to platform_data. Maybe it's only 4xx that needs this so other PPC subarches can convert possibly with a little less work. -Matt