Re: [PATCH 0/3] Add hardware dependency to TS-4800 board drivers

[Jean Delvare]

Hi Damien,

Le Tuesday 09 February 2016 Ã 10:08 -0500, Damien Riegel a Ãcrit :
> On Tue, Feb 09, 2016 at 11:15:49AM +0100, Jean Delvare wrote:
> > This adds hardware dependency to 3 drivers for the Technologic Systems
> > TS-4800 board. Thanks to these dependencies, users of other systems
> > will not accidentally enable these drivers.
> 
> These drivers are for IPs implemented in an FPGA. For now it is true
> that they are used only on one board with an iMX.51 but this is not a
> strong dependency and it might change in the future if Technologic
> Systems decide to reuse these IPs on boards based on different SoCs.

When this happens, we can update the dependency accordingly, this is not
a problem.

> As the FPGA and the SoC are two separate chips, I don't know how such
> dependency should be expressed in kconfig.

The way I did ;-)

These dependencies just tell where the hardware is being used at the
moment. They do not imply that the same hardware can't be reused later
on another board. In which case we can extend the dependency (e.g.
adding another SOC family), or broaden it (e.g. "depends on ARM") or
drop it altogether if the piece of hardware in question has taken over
the world meanwhile.

But my experience is that a piece of hardware developed for i.MX has
little chances to be found on a PowerPC system, even 5 years later.

-- 
Jean Delvare
SUSE L3 Support