Re: multiple drivers, single device

[Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>]

Roland Dreier wrote:
>  > The work I'm doing here is for stupid PCI firmware engineers, who have
>  > created devices that are different things, all bound up under the same
>  > PCI device.  I'm thinking of watchdog timers and random number
>  > generator and i2c controller on the same PCI device, or even the more
>  > basic, frame buffer and DRM access to the same PCI video device.
>  > 
>  > The OLPC is a good example of hardware that needs this kind of
>  > functionality.
> 
> Sounds interesting.  I've been meaning to work on this too for quite a
> while, but I'm glad to see you beat me to it.
> 
> An example of an in-tree use case for this would be the mlx4 drivers--
> you can look at drivers/net/mlx4/intf.c to see the simple stupid
> solution I came up with to allow an IB and a NIC (not yet upstream)
> driver to share the same PCI device.  A good test for your stuff would
> be if it simplifies the code from the ad hoc solution I came up with.

Our APIs are written such that the PCI device probe function is the 
starting point for registering IB and NIC.  No need for anything new.

	Jeff