Re: [DRIVER][RFC] SC1200 Watchdog driver

Dave Jones
2002-02-21T14:55:12Z

On Thu, Feb 21, 2002 at 04:27:34PM +0200, Zwane Mwaikambo wrote:
> Thanks Alan and Jeff for the input, i'll cleanup this stuff. Out of
> interest, do we normally take in patches for specialised embedded boxes? I
> see the AMD Elan stuff got in but that only touched one area and was easy
> to integrate. I presume they'd get accepted if the code was broken up into
> seperate modules instead of being overly specialised. For example, the
> CRIS stuff in the Etrax tree (developer.axis.com).

It seems lately there has been a surge of interest in getting
niche x86 clones included in mainline (Voyager, numaq, Elan, etc).
I forget who it was who suggested it, but the idea came up of
using a similar approach to arm's subarchitecture support for x86.

The downsides would probably be a lot of code duplication,
The upside would be hiding away specialised code from the 99% of
people who don't need to see it. The Voyager patch for example
was ~150kb iirc, and was imo still quite intrusive even after
a first round of suggestions. Putting it into arch/x86-32/voyager/
would allow those that do care about it to do whatever they deem
necessary without inflicting dozens of #ifdefs and the likes
on the majority.

--
| Dave Jones. http://www.codemonkey.org.uk
| SuSE Labs