Re: RFC: Platform data for onboard USB assets

Andy Green
2011-03-11T16:27:04Z

On 03/11/2011 04:03 PM, Somebody in the thread at some point said:
> On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 04:54:03PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>> On Friday 11 March 2011, Mark Brown wrote:
>
>>> It's arguable if this stuff is broken at all, from a hardware design
>>> point of view it's perfectly reasonable and if you're shipping volumes
>>> in the millions very small savings add up to interesting numbers easily.
>
>> It may be reasonable if you don't expect anyone to connect the
>> device to an ethernet port, but in that case you could save much
>> more by removing the ethernet chip and the socket along with the
>> eeprom.
>
>> Really, any machine without a fixed MAC address is a huge pain
>> for users, just google for "pandaboard mac address" to see
>> how much work this has caused people.
>
> I'm not familiar with the Pandaboard but most of the devices I've worked
> with that do this have unique MAC addresses but they store in other
> locations on the device (typically in flash).
>
> Like I say, it's not just MAC addresses that can need configuring this
> way - it can be other random "you're wired up this way" type
> information that would normally be figured out from the USB IDs.

Yes that's exactly why I was thinking it's a class of requirement that
could reasonably be a little API and extending platform_data to it. So
anyone with onboard USB device can take advantage if they need to,
because I guess we see gradually more boards like that.

The driver knows well all about the actual device, but there is a class
of configuration information that is defined by the physical board
itself - as you say "how it is wired" - and needs to be passed into the
driver to inform it of its "functional configuration". When that
functional configuration information is a feature of the board alone,
actually the board definition file is the right place for it.

-Andy