Re: Representing Embedded Architectures at the Kernel Summit

[Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 09:42:46AM +0300, Mike Rapoport wrote:
> James Bottomley wrote:
> > We've got to the point where there are simply too many embedded
> > architectures to invite all the arch maintainers to the kernel summit.
> > So, this year, we thought we'd do embedded via topic driven invitations
> > instead.  So what we're looking for is a proposal to discuss the issues
> > most affecting embedded architectures, or preview any features affecting
> > the main kernel which embedded architectures might need ... or any other
> > topics from embedded architectures which might need discussion or
> > debate.
> 
> Another issue that affects embedded architectures is drivers initialization
> order. There are a lot of cases when you need the drivers to be initialized in
> particular order, and current initcalls scheme does not allow fine grained
> control for it.
> 
Look at the early platform device abstraction, this allows specific
fine-grained control over when certain drivers are initialized, well
before the driver core is available. On SH this is how we deal with 
our system timers as clockevents/clocksources while just using regular
platform devices, and having no other abstraction. You can read more in
Documentation/driver-model/platform.txt.  For an example,  you can grep
for earlytimer in arch/sh as well as in drivers/clocksource.