Re: [PATCH] PCI: altera: Allow building as module

From: Bjorn Helgaas
Date: Tue Jun 04 2019 - 09:22:46 EST


On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 12:57:14PM +0800, Ley Foon Tan wrote:
> Altera PCIe Rootport IP is a soft IP and is only available after
> FPGA image is programmed.
>
> Make driver modulable to support use case FPGA image is programmed
> after kernel is booted. User proram FPGA image in kernel then only load
> PCIe driver module.

I'm not objecting to these patches, but help me understand how this
works. The "usual" scenario is that if a driver is loaded before a
matching device is available, i.e., either the driver is built
statically or it is loaded before a device is hot-added, the event of
the device being available causes the driver's probe method to be
called.

This seems to be a more manual process of programming the FPGA which
results in a new "altera-pcie" platform device. And then apparently
you need to load the appropriate module by hand? Is there no
"hot-add" type of event for this platform device that automatically
looks for the driver?

Bjorn