Subject: [PATCHv5 0/3] Introduce the /proc/socinfo and use it to export OMAP data

From: [email-masked] (Ryan Mallon)
Date: Thu, 03 Mar 2011 09:09:39 +1300

On 03/02/2011 09:50 PM, Maxime Coquelin wrote:
> On 03/02/2011 04:54 AM, Ryan Mallon wrote:
>> On 03/02/2011 04:46 PM, Saravana Kannan wrote:
>>> On 03/01/2011 07:35 PM, Ryan Mallon wrote:
>>>> The only real objection I have to adding the SoC family information is
>>>> basically to discourage it being abused by userspace. I can see it
>>>> being
>>>> useful in debug situations, but I can also see stupid userspace
>>>> applications explicitly testing for some particular SoC, rather than
>>>> more correctly (IMHO) checking for presence of certain drivers etc.
>>> True, but so many other things could be misused by stupid userspace
>>> programs. When there are legitimate usecases, I think we shouldn't
>>> prevent them just because we think a stupid userspace program could
>>> misuse it.
>>>
>>> Again, although you might not be gung-ho about this, I think I have at
>>> least made you indifferent/mildly supportive to adding socinfo. If you
>>> don't mind, I would like to wait for others to chime in before
>>> continuing this discussion.
>> Agreed.
>>
>> In general I am in support of having the SoC information exposed
>> somewhere. I think we just want to be careful that it doesn't become a
>> dumping ground for anything and everything SoC related whether the
>> information is useful or not. I think each piece of exposed information
>> should have a genuine use case, not just "because we can".
> I definitely agree we should not export every SoC-related information
> just because we can do it.
> The first goal of this interface was to export some SoCs IDs, as we need
> this kind of information for some user-space tools.
> Does someone need to export other information than the mach name and
> some IDs?
> 
> As proposed in my previous mail, do you agree to have a unified file for
> all vendors, which exports the unique silicon ID of the chip?

As mentioned earlier, on ep93xx we would like to export the Maverick
Crunch ID, which is a unique identifier for the chip.

I think the ABI should specify a minimum set of values which are
guaranteed to be provided on all SoCs, but allow individual SoCs to
provide additional information as necessary.

~Ryan

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