Re: drivers/macintosh/Kconfig (was: Re: Linux 2.6.3-rc1)

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>]

> I've been thinking about splitting up the ADB and other functions
> of the egret, cuda, and pmu. The abuse of adb_request for non-ADB
> functionality should go away. With the new driver model, the ADB
> bus will be represented as a generic bus and any request should
> go to a specific bus or device. I don't want to have to assume
> a single, global bus the way the current code does.
>
> I would prefer to have ADB be really just for ADB. The power
> management stuff should be a separate interface, and really
> should be more generic across the different Mac power management
> systems. Although the egret and cuda don't do as much as pmu,
> they still manage poweroff, reset, and the PRAM/RTC. These are
> totally unrelated to ADB, and that stuff I think should be left
> in drivers/macintosh/.

I agree that the abuse of adb_request should go, though replacing
it isn't easy at this stage. It's not worth bothering with a
common interface for things like poweroff, reset and RTC imho,
it would only solve a small part of the problem, there are too
many places where we actually need to send directly a PMU command.

Part of the problem is that the PMU driver low level state machine
it tied to the format of the adb_request structure. I don't think
I will fix any of that for 2.6. For 2.7, I may define a low level
pmu_request structure _without_ embedded buffers and have the ADB
request handling allocate one of those atomically.

Ben.


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