Re: [PATCH] spi: reorganize drivers

From: Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>
To: Jean Delvare <khali@linux-fr.org>
Cc: Grant Likely <grant.likely@secretlab.ca>,
	"Maciej W. Rozycki" <macro@linux-mips.org>,
	Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>,
	Russell King <linux@arm.linux.org.uk>,
	Michael Buesch <mb@bu3sch.de>, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>,
	linux-pcmcia@lists.infradead.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
	Florian Fainelli <florian@openwrt.org>,
	James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com>,
	Alexandre Bounine <alexandre.bounine@idt.com>,
	Stefan Richter <stefanr@s5r6.in-berlin.de>,
	"Ben Dooks \(embedded platforms\)" <ben-linux@fluff.org>,
	spi-devel-general@lists.sourceforge.net,
	Matt Porter <mporter@kernel.crashing.org>,
	"David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] spi: reorganize drivers
Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2011 14:35:07 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <BANLkTim9AyAadtY15E3zV0sOcVP-UXppLw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20110606141636.150c54b5@endymion.delvare>

On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 14:16, Jean Delvare <khali@linux-fr.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Jun 2011 13:21:07 +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>> On Monday 06 June 2011, James Bottomley wrote:
>> > I'd say it only makes sense if we do it for all busses ... so USB and
>> > PCI would have to move too.  Logically, the bus code should move and we
>> > should be left with the drivers in both of those directories.  I'd also
>> > say that we don't have to deepen the tree: /bus would be fine.  That
>> > way, /drivers/<bus> would be only for <bus> specific drivers, with non
>> > bus specific drivers we just group them by function as now.
>>
>> A top-level /bus would work for me, and I guess would also address Russell's
>> concern. Regarding bus-specific drivers, we're gradually moving those out
>> of the bus specific directories anyway, basically the only bus directory
>> that really has device driver in it is USB at this point. It makes some
>> sense to have a bus-specific low-level user space interface driver like
>> sg or uio in the bus directory, but everything else should really belong
>> into some other subsystem.
>
> Err, what about I2C and SPI? Aren't drivers/i2c/busses and drivers/spi
> full of "device drivers"? Or are these what you call "bus-specific
> drivers"? Maybe we need to define all the terms before the discussion
> continues further.

Arnd did write:

| It does include i2c and spi, which stick out by being a lot larger
than most others.

>> (...)
>> This is about to get worse as we introduce new subsystems (e.g. iommu,
>> irq, clocksource, eeprom, nvram, ...) into which we are moving
>> code from arch/arm, drivers/char and drivers/misc. Having buses and
>> drivers in a separate hierarchy would make the drivers directory and
>> the respective menuconfig list more clearly structured IMHO.
>
> This gets interesting. Would you suggest for example that i2c-core.c
> goes to bus/i2c, and drivers/i2c/busses becomes drivers/i2c? And that
> CONFIG_I2C is somewhere in menuconfig, and the hardware driver
> selection for drivers/i2c is in a totally different place?
>
> While I am surprised, I am not necessarily objecting. But it seems that
> you should better define what your actual plan is, before asking us if
> we agree with it.

Most other drivers are located based use case, i.e. from the user's
point of view,
e.g. drivers/net/ and drivers/video.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds

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