Re: [PATCH RFT] driver core: faux: allow to set the firmware node for a faux device

[Bartosz Golaszewski]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2026 at 1:43 PM Greg Kroah-Hartman
<gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Mar 10, 2026 at 01:29:53PM +0100, Bartosz Golaszewski wrote:
> > On a completely unrelated note though - Greg: I think this patch could
> > still be considered because we now have quite a lot of functionality
> > put into software nodes and already have some auxiliary devices that
> > use software nodes as a source of device properties/config using the
> > same API as platform devices (fwnode). I think faux devices could also
> > profit from it and not necessairly use custom struct. If that sounds
> > good to you, I may convert one or two faux devices and send a series
> > with actual users of this.
>
> I don't understand why a device that has a fwnode would ever be a "faux"
> device?  Why wouldn't that just be a normal platform device?
>
> faux devices were created to be not platform devices, to take away the
> abuse where platform devices were being used because the api was simple
> and people wanted a device in the tree somewhere, but there was not
> actually any backing platform device present.
>
> So the use of a fwnode here feels very odd to me, what am I missing?
>

A firmware node can be a dynamic software node created just for that
faux device to pass to it its configuration instead of using a custom
platform data structure.

Bart