Re: [GIT PATCH] char/misc patches for 3.10-rc1

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Mon Apr 29 2013 - 17:13:14 EST


On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 1:50 PM, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Fair enough. Of course the distinction here is not based on what it
> does, but how it gets used.

Even technically, a "bus" generally has a topology. It has addresses,
and it has a protocol.

i2c is a bus. PCI is a bus. And something like SSB is a bus. There is
a protocol, there's device with identity on the bus, there's stuff
going on.

The SBBI driver has neither addresses nor a protocol. It's literally
just an embedded on-chip serial device as far as I can tell. There's
nothing "bus" about it. It's just a hose.

Yeah, yeah, at some point you can call "anything" a bus. I could call
my little two-seater car a "school bus", because it has wheels, it's
even yellow exactly like the school buses around here. And I can put a
child in it. So my little yellow two-seater must be a bus too. It's
all just how you define your words.

But it's a damn big reach. I didn't use to call the serial line
connecting my computer to the modem a "bus". Even if it connected two
devices.

Linus
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/