Re: RFC: Platform data for onboard USB assets

Arnd Bergmann
2011-03-14T14:54:54Z

On Friday 11 March 2011, Grant Likely wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 2:50 AM, Andy Green <andy@warmcat.com> wrote:
> > Hi -
> >
> > platform_data is a well established way in Linux to pass configuration data
> > up to on-board assets from a machine file like mach-xyz.c. It's also
> > supported to pass platform_data up to devices that are probed asynchronously
> > from busses like i2c as well, which is very handy.
> >
> > However AFAIK it's not possible to bind platform_data to probed USB devices
> > as it stands.
>
> Oh, please no.
>
> platform_data is an ugly non-type-checked anonymous pointer. If you
> need to pass data to a driver, use something better designed. A
> device tree fragment would work, or provide some kind of query api.
> platform_data is definitely the wrong approach.

I'd still hope that we could do without either for hotpluggable
devices, but a device tree object fits better here, because
we already have ways to associate the data in the device node
with any device, not just platform devices, and the key/value
pairs make it much more flexible than platform data.

Arnd