Subject: Re: [PATCH 7/7] [v2] drivers/misc: introduce Freescale hypervisor management driver

From: Arnd Bergmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2011 21:16:21 +0200

On Tuesday 07 June 2011 18:49:02 Chris Metcalf wrote:
> > You can probably argue that the tile drivers do fit in here as long as
> > they are specific to the hypervisor and not to some SOC specific hardware.
> 
> Can you clarify that?   I think you're contrasting something like an ARM
> core that was licensed and put in a SoC by some random vendor, and you
> could have an endless stream of drivers for that case.  The Tilera core
> isn't being licensed; it's sold more like an Intel chip with a fixed set of
> interfaces available only from Tilera.  The particular interface in
> question here is SPI, and the core itself knows how to boot the chip over
> SPI by finding an SPI ROM and reading the boot stream out of it directly
> after power-up.
> 
> So does that match with your model of "drivers/platform/tile"?  Maybe we
> have a winner!  :-)

I'm not really against drivers/platform/tile for this, the only potential
problem that I see with this is that having more stuff in drivers/platform
might lead to having even more other stuff in there that should really
go into another place.

Obviously, if the device is a raw SPI host, the driver should actually go
into drivers/spi/spi_tile.c rather than drivers/platform/tile/spi.c.

For the spi flash driver that goes through the hypervisor abstraction,
I think drivers/virt/tile would be better than driver/platform/tile,
but we should really have a new "abstract flash character driver" subsystem
for that.

	Arnd