quoted

   I never suggested that -- what I did suggest was make of_serial.c
recognize certain chip types and register them with 8250 driver.

What would be the advantage of maintaining a list of chips whose only
difference is register spacing, rather than just using reg-shift and
being done with it?

reg-shift alone isn't enough to know how to access the device
registers.  In the case of UARTs, they typically are internal
to some SoC, so the device driver can just look up what SoC it
is and will then know what to do.  For IDE though, as far as I
understand it typically is board-specific, done by some glue
logic off of some GPIOs or on an FPGA; I think detection is best
handled by platform code in this case, an "mmio-ide" shim driver
would be helpful of course.


Segher