Re: [PATCH] Make nand block functions use provided byte/word helpers.

[Ben Dooks <ben-mtd@fluff.org>]

On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 10:25:59PM +0000, Jonathan McDowell wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 10:12:43PM +0000, Ben Dooks wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 08:59:03PM +0000, Jonathan McDowell wrote:
> > > I've been writing a NAND driver for the flash on the Amstrad E3. One of
> > > the peculiarities of this device is that the write & read enable lines
> > > are on a latch, rather than strobed by the act of reading/writing from
> > > the data latch. As such I've got custom read_byte/write_byte functions
> > > defined. However the nand_*_buf functions in drivers/mtd/nand/nand_base.c
> > > are all appropriate, except for the fact they call readb/writeb
> > > themselves, instead of using this->read_byte or this->write_byte. The
> > > patch below changes them to use these functions, meaning a driver just
> > > needs to define read_byte and write_byte functions and gains all the
> > > nand_*_buf functions free.
> > 
> > Why not make life easier on everyone else by over-riding the
> > functions for read/write buffer (etc) in the nand driver... less
> > intrusive into the core code!
> 
> If the patch is deemed too intrusive then that's what I'll do; I nearly
> did so originally but when I caught myself cut and pasting the code from
> nand_base I thought my patch was the cleaner way.
> 
> The patch shouldn't cause any extra work for anyone that I can see and I
> don't think it's intrusive at all; I submitted it because I figured it
> might save someone else some work down the line as well.

Well, a small iritation is that it adds work for the read and 
write byte function, as a function call adds instructions to
the path. Also, do you want to check that it dosen't break
any existing drivers?

Secondly, you'll probably have a better piece of code for the
E3 driver if you did the block calls with only one setup for
the r/w enable lines per block, instead of checking them for
every byte done. You may even want to use readsb/writesb or
DMA to accelerate the operation.

-- 
Ben (ben@fluff.org, http://www.fluff.org/)

  'a smiley only costs 4 bytes'