Re: x86: IPC driver patch for Intel Moorestown platform

[Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>]

On Tuesday 21 July 2009, Gurudatt, Sreenidhi B wrote:
> On Tuesday 21 July 2009, Alan Cox wrote:
> > > 1. built-in code adds platform-device for mrst_ipc
> > > 2. user space auto-loads the mrst_ipc driver
>
> The IPC driver APIs for host drivers communicate with the SCU 
> (System Controller Unit) firmware on the platform. It is used
> by many Moorestown platform specific drivers such as Audio,
> Touch Screen, GPIO, Battery, Power Management etc for accessing
> PMIC (Power Management Interrupt Controller). It will typically
> get loaded during boot and gets unloaded on shutdown.
> I don't think it should be loaded and unloaded by the user-space apps.

Well, all modules get loaded from user space (modprobe)
by definition, I was not referring to interactive applictions.

The real difference is whether it can get autoloaded at
boot time by udev based on the present device nodes, or
you need to manually put it into /etc/modules.

If you simply create platform devices at boot time,
you get both the autoloading and a reasonable representation
in /sys/devices/platform/mrst_ipc/... for free.

	Arnd <><