Re: [PATCH 3/5] fpga: add basic CARMA board support

[Stephen Neuendorffer <stephen.neuendorffer@gmail.com>]

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On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 4:38 PM, Benjamin Herrenschmidt <
benh@kernel.crashing.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 2010-09-08 at 09:41 -0700, Ira W. Snyder wrote:
> > This adds basic support for the system controller FPGA on the OVRO CARMA
> > board. This patch only adds infrastructure that will be used by later
> > drivers.
>
> Oh and another comment ...
>
> I'm not sure about drivers/fpga ... in the end, one would expect such a
> directory to contain stuff to manipulate FPGAs in the sense of
> downloading bitfiles, instanciating devices (device-tree manipulation ?)
> etc...
>
> From what I see in your code, the fact that these are FPGAs is almost
> irrelevant, you are providing support for "carma" devices, and such are
> no different than some other platform device, they just happen to be
> implemented as FPGAs. Or am I missing something ?
>
> Cheers,
> Ben.
>
>
Generally, I agree with this: There doesn't seem to be anything generic
about
the FPGA support you are adding, it seems very specific to the CARMA
hardware.

I'm generally not opposed to drivers/fpga: I think that colocating drivers
for things
that are basically FPGA compute platforms isn't necessarily a bad idea, but
I think it would be better if those devices were colocated because they
shared
some FPGA-oriented infrastructure, which this doesn't seem to do.
Currently,
generic infrastructure has been going into drivers/char, and drivers
themselves have
been going wherever they seem best.  Really what you have is 2 character
devices: one
for configuration, and one for access.

Steve

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