Re: RFC: Rev 0.5 Booting the Linux/ppc kernel without Open Firmware
From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Date: 2005-12-18 07:18:32
No. Their name can be whatever is required. The "device_type" should be "pci", for conventional PCI busses; and it should be whatever is defined by the appropriate OF binding for newer, mostly PCI-comnpatible, busses (like HT, PCIe, PCI-X, etc.)
Yes, but the recommended practice is still to call them "pci" :) The device_type of "pci" defines the fact that it's providing a PCI bus, but is not unique to PCI hosts, p2p bridges share it. It's a convention for a pci host bridge however to be named "pci" while a p2p bridge is named "pci-bridge". As for HT, PCI-X, PCI-E etc... I don't think there are much bindings around, but I would recommend sticking strictly to the PCI one, only adding something to either model or compatible. We may want to standardize some additional things that aren't in the binding, like a pci-family (pci, pci-e, pci-x, ht) property, or a extended-config-space to advertise support for config space > 4096, etc. At this point, I would really like to find out the remains of the OF working group an kick that back into life to properly define those things.
It is up to a device's parent bus to find the correct driver; for the parent bus, device_type and/or compatible are normally enough to do the matching. "model" is useful to disambiguate sometimes, but it normally is _too_ exact to do useful driver matching.
Except that OF platform devices don't really have a parent bus, they expose a bus_type structure that can be used to match any device node in the OF tree. There is no and there will not be a 1:1 relationship between the OF device-tree and the linux one, so we must do compromises.
Interrupts are evil evil evil as always ;-)
Yah, and I need to design something smart on the linux side to backup my promise of not requiring device-nodes per PCI devices, since that means not requiring nodes for p2p bridges neither, and thus impementing a generic interrupt mapping algorithm that works both with full of parsing, but also with partial one, doing standard swizzling for bridges without a node (and with a platform hook to override that optionally). On my todo list but not done yet.
Yes, almost every SoC has at least two busses; e.g., you often see a high-speed coherent "system" bus, and a lower-speed non-coherent I/O bus connected to it. But there are lots of variations to this theme.
That shouldn't be a problem anyway. Just cascade them and don't forget the "ranges" property :)
SMT threads should not be represented as separate CPUs. But some CPU resources that are described in a CPU node are non-shared between SMT threads; we need to find a way to describe those. The biggest problem is interrupts (as always); the unit-id for a "cpu" node in OF is the IPI number of that CPU, but on SMT, IPIs are per thread.
Yes, that's a problem Ben.