Re: [PATCH] Re: Move of input drivers, some word needed from you

From: almesber@lrc.di.epfl.ch
Date: Mon Aug 21 2000 - 21:26:28 EST


[ Ccs trimmed ]

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> In the end, we just have to balance the "everything in one place so that
> it is easy to find" with "uhhuh, that 'ls' output is just too confusing,
> and I can't seem to find my driver any more".

I think there is value in having everything under drivers/... With
drivers/<bus>, we can already cover most of the architecture-specific
bits. Maybe just a few more bus types are needed - e.g. many "system on
a chip" design families have some tiny little bus and all the devices
there are rather unique and may have a lot of shared resources.

On the other hand, drivers/<function> makes sense for generic drivers
(e.g. drivers/char/mem.c) and those supporting many buses. So perhaps a
chipset that is used on many platforms should be split into the bus
interfaces in drivers/<bus> and the portable part in drivers/<fn> ?

This would probably require include/drivers or such, to avoid
cluttering include/linux with tons of additional "internal" files.
Also, drivers/<bus> should probably be reserved for drivers for the bus
itself, with the device drivers in drivers/<bus>/<fn>, or drivers/pci
would look a little nasty ;-)

Furthermore, if a driver starts is existence in drivers/<bus>, and then
turns out to be useful on other buses too, it would have to be split.
This would be a departure from the current implicit assumption that you
pick "The Right Place" once and forever. It would also make it harder
to port somebody else's driver to a second bus. But it would limit code
replication.

Does this sound reasonable ?

- Werner

-- 
  _________________________________________________________________________
 / Werner Almesberger, ICA, EPFL, CH       werner.almesberger@ica.epfl.ch /
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