Re: multiple drivers, single device

Greg KH
2008-02-12T17:53:32Z

On Tue, Feb 12, 2008 at 09:42:20AM -0800, Roland Dreier wrote:
> > The work I'm doing here is for stupid PCI firmware engineers, who have
> > created devices that are different things, all bound up under the same
> > PCI device. I'm thinking of watchdog timers and random number
> > generator and i2c controller on the same PCI device, or even the more
> > basic, frame buffer and DRM access to the same PCI video device.
> >
> > The OLPC is a good example of hardware that needs this kind of
> > functionality.
>
> Sounds interesting. I've been meaning to work on this too for quite a
> while, but I'm glad to see you beat me to it.
>
> An example of an in-tree use case for this would be the mlx4 drivers--
> you can look at drivers/net/mlx4/intf.c to see the simple stupid
> solution I came up with to allow an IB and a NIC (not yet upstream)
> driver to share the same PCI device. A good test for your stuff would
> be if it simplifies the code from the ad hoc solution I came up with.

Great, I'll look into that as I need a test case for this kind of stuff.

thanks,

greg k-h