[PATCH 3/4] ARM: Xilinx: Adding timer support to the platform

[arnd@arndb.de (Arnd Bergmann)]

On Tuesday 08 February 2011 18:53:50 John Linn wrote:
> Maybe I'm being dense here, just wanting to be clear.
> 
> But that still doesn't provide physical addresses for each device like
> you would need to put in the resources
> for platform devices.

No, you're right. If you want to have them in proper resource
structures, you need the physical addresses as unsigned long
numbers, not the virtual address pointers.

> Do you just cast them back to an integer then?

No, you certainly never do that, it would be a clear
violation of the type system. You should assume that
physical and virtual addresses are different, and never
build any driver code under the assumption that the
virtual addresses are fixed (except perhaps the PCI
PIO window).

My personal recommendation would be to either put the
physical address into the resource structure and have
the driver ioremap the registers, or to map the entire
registers at boot time, and have the driver use the
hardcoded values while ignoring the resources.

The ioremap approach is more flexible, in particular when
you build a kernel that can have the devices at varying
locations, but it doesn't work for all the low-level devices
that you might need to talk to before the MMU code is
fully initialized, such as timers and interrupt controllers.

	Arnd