Re: [PATCH 2/3] ARM: sunxi: Add an ahci-platform compatible AHCIdriver for the Allwinner SUNXi series of SoCs

From: Thomas Petazzoni
Date: Fri Dec 06 2013 - 04:01:46 EST


Dear Tejun Heo,

On Wed, 4 Dec 2013 08:23:12 -0500, Tejun Heo wrote:

> > But again, point me (for dummies ;) in the right direction and I'll
> > work on it with some help.
>
> Richard and Shawn recently worked on ahci_imx. Can you guys please
> talk with each other and figure out what can be done to share as much
> as possible among these new platform-specific drivers? I'd really
> like to see the common things factored out as much as possible with
> only the actual hardware differences described for each device.

Also, please Cc me on such discussions. I have a pending AHCI platform
driver for another ARM SoC family. It is very similar to ahci_platform,
but needs to do a few more things that are SoC specific (map an
additional register area, and do some SoC-specific stuff with them).

For the moment, we're left with two approaches:

* Do what Oliver did, where the ahci_<foo> driver will do its own
SoC-specific stuff, and then will register an additional
platform_device to trigger the ->probe() of the generic
ahci_platform driver. I must say I don't really like this solution,
since it involves having two platform_device registered for the same
piece of hardware (one platform_device to trigger the ->probe of
ahci_<foo>, and another one to trigger the ->probe of ahci_platform).

* Duplicate in ahci_<foo> the (relatively small) amount of code that
is present in ahci_platform.

>From my point of view, ahci_platform should be turned into a small
"library", that provides an API for ahci_<foo> drivers to 1/ do their
own custom stuff and 2/ do the common ahci_platform stuff.

This way we avoid the registration of two platform_device for the same
piece of hardware, and we avoid the duplication of code.

Want me to propose a RFC for this idea?

Best regards,

Thomas
--
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com
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