Re: RFC - removal of SPROM fallback

[Larry Finger <Larry.Finger@lwfinger.net>]

On 12/01/2010 04:20 PM, Florian Fainelli wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Le 01/12/2010 22:56, Michael Büsch a écrit :
>> On Wed, 2010-12-01 at 13:15 -0600, Larry Finger wrote:
>>> At one time, we thought that we had found BCM43xx devices with no
>>> SPROM. In the
>>> one case that I remember, it was because the SPROM had been relocated.
>>>
>>> I now have the data from John's device that needs the revision fixup
>>> and I know
>>> what is wrong - it is rev 2 with corrupted CRC. The defaulting to rev
>>> 1 is
>>> getting almost everything wrong, including MAC address and vendor. My
>>> plan is to
>>> write a better fixup routine.
>>>
>>> At the moment, we have some SPROM fallback code that has not been fully
>>> implemented, and is probably not needed. Are there any objections to
>>> stripping
>>> this code out of drivers/ssb/pci.c and drivers/ssb/sprom.c?
>>
>> Yes. The code is needed for bcm63xx embedded devices. The code that uses
>> it currently is not in mainline, though. It can be found in the OpenWRT
>> repositories.
> 
> It actually is mainline and used.
> 
>>
>> But I still think that the SPROM fallback mechanism should be replaced
>> by a "platform data" based mechanism, or similar. Just removing it
>> without replacement is not an option, because bcm63xx embedded really
>> does not have an SPROM.
> 
> Correct. The rationale behind this is that if you have a big flash for
> your system, you do not want to afford the cost for another flash chip
> storing the SPROM. Whichever mechanism works for your, I will do the
> required changes in the bcm63xx architecture code.

There is no need for that. I'll start my changes after the check for a fallback
SPROM returns NULL. My only reason for removing anything is that I thought it
was not used.

Larry