Re: Multiple drivers for same hardware:, was: DRM and pci_driver conversion

From: James Simmons (jsimmons_at_infradead.org)
Date: 10/28/03

  • Next message: David S. Miller: "Re: status of ipchains in 2.6?" 
    Date:	Tue, 28 Oct 2003 18:00:38 +0000 (GMT)
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

    > Since they have to co-operate some way on the resources _anyway_, they'll
    > just need to work it out amongst themselves.
    >
    > One common case is to have a "arbitration driver" that tends to do the
    > actual low-level accesses and is one level of abstraction over the
    > hardware (papers over trivial differences in hardware). An example of this
    > would be the old-style ISA DMA infrastructure (now happily pretty much
    > dead), where the "DMA driver" was just a trivial layer that had some basic
    > allocation/deallocation and had somewhat nicer access routines than the
    > raw IO accesses, but didn't do much more.

    I already have thought ahead about this issue. That is why one of the
    major changes to the framebuffer layer was to seperate the driver data
    into struct fb_info and a struct xxx_par. The idea was the data in struct
    fb_info was for the framebuffer layer and the data in struct xxx_par could
    be shared with other interfaces like DRI. The par idea can be extended
    further and we could use a common structure between a low level text mode
    console driver and a graphics driver. For example mdacon and hgafb.

    -
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  • Next message: David S. Miller: "Re: status of ipchains in 2.6?"

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