Re: [PATCH] video console: add a driver for lcd2s character display

[Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>]

On Tuesday 20 November 2012, Lars Poeschel wrote:
> > 
> > It's better to define the struct consw as a preinitialized
> > 'static const' object, rather than dynamically setting each
> > member.
> 
> I could not find a place to store the drivers private data inside the struct 
> vc_data. I wanted to have the struct consw inside the drivers private data 
> (struct lcd2s_data) to be able to container_of to the drivers private data in 
> the consw.con_* functions. This makes it possible to use more than one actual 
> lcd2s display with the same driver. Otherwise I have to store the struct 
> i2c_client somewhere statically and the driver can control only one display 
> and has to forbid to be probed a second time. Or am I wrong somewhere ?

I believe you can only have one device anyway, because of the way you
register using "take_over_console(&data->consw, LCD2S_FIRST, LCD2S_LAST, 1);"

Whichever lcd2s was last registered gets VC 8 and 9. This is not nice, but
I think it's similar to how all the other VC work. They consequently don't
store per-device data at all, but just have global variables for device
specific data. We generally discourage this behaviour for device drivers,
but I woulnd't expect you to change the way that VC works, so you can just
do the same here.

Things would be different if this was a "console" driver rather than a "vc"
driver.

	Arnd