Subject: Re: [PATCH v1] Add support for getting device platform data to I2C device

From: Anton Vorontsov <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2008 19:59:46 +0300

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 10:14:11AM +0800, Mingkai Hu wrote:
> There is no standard way of getting device platform data from
> dts file to the I2C device when it's probed. This patch adds
> a function pointer to the of_modalias_table to get such bindings
> properties into device's platform data.

Unfortunately this approach leads to inability to make the bindings
modular.

Note that distributions compile kernels with allmodconfig*, so the
kernel builds with all modules, but _all_ these bindings will be
kernel's built-ins. Given that these bindings are needed for every
not-so-trivial I2C (or SPI) driver, the approach doesn't seem to
scale good enough.

You can find more discussion on this matter in this huge thread:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/10/16/248

And the solution that everybody seem to agree with (SPI driver example):
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/10/30/393

* Well, this is not quite true, but they're very close to allmodconfig.

-- 
Anton Vorontsov
email: [email-masked]
irc://irc.freenode.net/bd2