Re: [PATCH 2/3] ide: add at91_ide driver

[Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz <bzolnier@gmail.com>]

On Friday 06 February 2009, Sergei Shtylyov wrote:
> Hello, I wrote:
> 
> >>    Can you answer the simple question: why we should try to support 
> >> two incompatible chips with a single driver? Because the driver name 
> >> will be shorter? :-)
> >
> >> Very funny. I think patch adding RM9200 support to this driver will 
> >> have less
> >> than 50 lines changeset,  whereas writing new driver would be about 
> >> 500 lines.
> >
> >    This approach is so broken-minded that I'm just out words to argue 
> > any more.
> > 
> >    Let's then support say all the PCI IDE chipsets with the single 
> > driver (actully, there was a driver that tried to support 2 
> > incompatible Promise chip families but it got split finally).

Actually it was the case for Linux during early 2.4.x days. :)

[ Probably for historical reasons. ]

>    To say the truth, there are stil at least 2 examples of such drivers: 
> hpt366 and aec6210. While the former is justified by the bogus chip 

The former can be probably still improved with hpt3xx_main.c and chipset
family specific code separated into hpt36x.c etc.

> identification poilicy used by the vendor, the latter has no 
> justification at all.

Patches are always warmly welcomed.

Thanks,
Bart