John,

I came across this thread/patchset from around June last year:

http://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/linuxppc-dev/2009-June/073086.html

where Wolfgang proposed a generic OF-driven UIO driver.  The

Wolfram, please ;)

discussion seemed to stall after Grant Likely indicated he didn't like
the use of a linux-specific compatible binding in the device tree
(compatible="generic-uio").

I agree with him on that.

I guess I have a couple of questions:

 * did this patchset go anywhere?  I've been using it here the last
few days and it works great.

The idea was to create a mechanism to instantiate bindings at runtime, similar
to new_id for PCI/PCMCIA, e.g.:

$ echo "commodore,c64" > /sys/bus/of_platform/drivers/of_uio_genirq/new_compatible

so we don't have to maintain an ever growing list of hardcoded
compatible-properties for those UIO-devices.

 * Is there a better way to handle the OF bindings for this sort of thing?

Run-time instantiation might help in a couple of other cases; still, in the
progress of unifying/extending the OF-support, it was discussed if it was
possible to get rid of of_platform entirely. It looks like a very challenging
task, but seems to be favoured designwise (at least I do).

However, the device-tree guys complain whenever anyone tries to encode
anything non-hardware related into the DTS itself.

Well, if I get a device tree including special properties for Linux and BSD and
whatever may follow, that could get quite confusing :)

I guess I'd like to just open up a discussion, see if there's been any
progress towards a general solution.

I decided to wait for the outcome of the of_platform-removal-idea. Though, I
have to admit that in the last weeks I haven't followed of-related things due
to other commitments.

Regards,

   Wolfram

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