Re: [PATCH V5 1/6] SLIMbus: Device management on SLIMbus

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Thursday 28 April 2016 15:38:01 Mark Brown wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 02:33:41PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > On Thursday 28 April 2016 12:53:37 Mark Brown wrote:
> > I don't foresee mobile phones with ACPI using this subsystem, but even
> > if we got them, it would be a horrible idea to use hardcoded board
> > specific tables in a platform file, and we should insist that whatever
> > firmware is present has a way to describe the slimbus devices.
> 
> Right, in this particular case I don't think it makes a huge difference
> but what you were talking about was "ancient pre-DT times" rather than
> something specific to this particular case.  That's definitely a thing
> that people keep thinking and it's good to push back on it since we do
> have non-DT cases to worry about (some architectures, other firmwares,
> things like PCI cards with other components on them and so on).

Ok, I see what you mean. It turns out I made the exact same
comment on the first review five years ago (phrased more
nicely back then):

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.documentation/3192/focus=3193

My comment this time was for the particular driver, but I'd
still also maintain that a new subsystem in general should not
start out by addressing the needs of traditional board files.
I don't think we have merge new platform support on any
architecture that would need this in the past years and
stuff like spi_board_info and i2c_board_info is only really
used on really old machines (but not going away any time soon
either).

	Arnd