Re: devres and requesting resources

From: Alan Cox
Date: Fri Feb 29 2008 - 09:07:20 EST


> Only rare PCI devices are shareable among multiple drivers.

Really. Let me see
AGP & EDAC
Serial/Parallel combo ports
MPIIX
CS5520
Lots of I2C bus stuff
VGA v 3D

There are quite a few, and some are already quite fun enough with our pci
struct model.

> sata_* at least intentionally used pci_request_regions() because it is
> obvious from the hardware spec that multiple regions accessed by
> multiple drivers is highly unlikely, without the driver being
> specifically coded to support such sharing. Such sharing code is far
> beyond simple resource reservation, to avoid stepping on toes when there
> is a single MMIO region and set of interrupt clearing registers.
>
> So reading your email it sounds like there are valid cases for both
> configurations.
>
> Its a design choice either way, not a bug either way.

It is a flaw: devres that assumes it should grab all resources is unusable
for some other drivers - it is no longer generic and that makes it far
less useful. I've got no problem with the idea of a devres way to say
"and I want it all, mine mine mine" but that should not be the only
behaviour.

Alan
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