Re: [PATCH 1/5] mtd: ofpart: grab device tree node directly from master device node

[Brian Norris <computersforpeace@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 10:54:46AM -0700, Brian Norris wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 08:42:00AM +0100, Boris Brezillon wrote:
> > On Mon, 26 Oct 2015 19:31:06 -0700
> > I like the idea, but how about pushing the solution even further and
> > killing the ->flash_node field which AFAICT is rendered useless by
> > your patch?
> 
> I suppose we could do that. I do think there's something to be said for
> layering, though. Historically, we haven't done a very good job of
> layering in MTD, so low-level drivers often have to poke around in the
> MTD structures, even if they really should only have to know a few
> things about their helper subsystem/library, like NAND or SPI NOR. So
> with that in mind, I think the ->flash_node serves some purpose --
> drivers can just initialize struct nand_chip/spi_nor and be assured that
> the NAND/SPI-NOR subsystems will take care of things.
> 
> Now, I don't think there's much reason to suspect that we'd have a more
> complex mapping than 1:1 between struct mtd_info and struct nand_chip or
> struct spi_nor, so maybe we don't actually need duplicate storage
> (mtd.dev.of_node and {spi_nor,nand_chip}.flash_node), and the layering
> is just have these APIs:
> 
> 	nand_set_flash_node()
> 	spi_nor_set_flash_node()
> 
> which just call mtd_set_of_node()?

I looked at this quickly for NAND, and it's hard to do right now because
of the below quote. The SPI NOR layering is better though, so that
works. Mind if I defer the dropping the flash_node in NAND but do the
SPI NOR one?

> Speaking of layering: why do we have NAND drivers initializing mtd->priv
> for us, yet nand_base just assumes that it points to a struct nand_chip?
> And why isn't struct mtd_info just embedded in struct nand_chip? Are
> there ever cases we want more than one (master) MTD per nand_chip? Or
> vice versa?

The layering (or lack thereof) make it hard to extract a struct mtd_info
from a struct nand_chip.

Brian