lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2011]   [Jun]   [6]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
    /
    From
    SubjectRe: [PATCH] spi: reorganize drivers
    Date
    On Monday 06 June 2011, Stefan Richter wrote:
    > On Jun 06 Arnd Bergmann wrote:
    > > On Monday 06 June 2011, Jean Delvare wrote:
    > On drivers/firewire/:
    >
    > FireWire drivers are currently spread over drivers/firewire (three
    > link-layer controller drivers + the IEEE 1394 core + two IEEE 1394
    > application layer drivers), drivers/media/dvb/firewire/ (one 1394
    > application layer driver), sound/firewire/ (two 1394 application layer
    > drivers, more are planned to be added there).
    >
    > From the Linux driver model POV,
    > 1. the IEEE 1394 core driver implements the firewire bus,
    > 2. the link-layer controller drivers implement pci bus based devices,
    > 3. the IEEE 1394 application layer drivers implement firewire bus based
    > devices. The two of them that are located in drivers/firewire/
    > expose a SCSI LLD (a transport in SCSI Architecture Model terms, but
    > a host rather than a transport in Linux implementation terms) and a
    > networking interface driver.
    >
    > Number 2 is something one would expect to find in a hypothetical
    > drivers/bus/ directory. But where do the others belong?
    >
    > Would type 1 drivers be kept in drivers/bus/firewire/? I understand your
    > above response to Jean that this is what you have in mind.

    Correct.

    > firewire-sbp2 could be moved into drivers/scsi/, and firewire-net could be
    > moved into drivers/net/. But what about maintenance? They could still be
    > maintained via linux1394-2.6.git because this worked so far, but then the
    > directory structure might irritate people who don't use
    > scripts/get_maintainer.pl all the time. Well, I could actually picture
    > firewire-net to be maintained via the net development tree, but I do
    > wonder how well firewire-sbp2 maintenance through the scsi tree would work.

    I guess the real question is whether firewire should be considered a bus
    like USB or a device class like SCSI, and it's abit of a grey area (SCSI
    is too). If you declare it to be a bus, I'd suggest moving the sbp2 and
    network drivers to drivers/scsi and drivers/net. If you like to think
    of firewire as a closed subsystem instead, it's probably better to leave
    all of it in drivers/firewire.

    > PS,
    > these are the same questions like with USB, only on a smaller scale. (The
    > usb-storage driver is maintained through the usb tree as well, not the
    > scsi tree. drivers/net/usb/ has got T: git .../gregkh/usb-2.6.git
    > assigned in MAINTAINERS but most of the commits there are actually done by
    > DaveM.)

    The difference that I see with usb-storage is that this one is really
    a set of different drivers for all sorts of devices, while the firewire sbp2
    driver feels more like a single driver that includes a few special
    cases. Also, USB is generally perceived as a generic interconnect, while
    firewire is seen primarily as a way to attach disk drives.

    The differences are of course gradual.

    Arnd


    \
     
     \ /
      Last update: 2011-06-06 17:07    [W:4.663 / U:0.732 seconds]
    ©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site