linux/include
Magnus Damm 13977091a9 Driver Core: early platform driver
V3 of the early platform driver implementation.

Platform drivers are great for embedded platforms because we can separate
driver configuration from the actual driver.  So base addresses,
interrupts and other configuration can be kept with the processor or board
code, and the platform driver can be reused by many different platforms.

For early devices we have nothing today.  For instance, to configure early
timers and early serial ports we cannot use platform devices.  This
because the setup order during boot.  Timers are needed before the
platform driver core code is available.  The same goes for early printk
support.  Early in this case means before initcalls.

These early drivers today have their configuration either hard coded or
they receive it using some special configuration method.  This is working
quite well, but if we want to support both regular kernel modules and
early devices then we need to have two ways of configuring the same
driver.  A single way would be better.

The early platform driver patch is basically a set of functions that allow
drivers to register themselves and architecture code to locate them and
probe.  Registration happens through early_param().  The time for the
probe is decided by the architecture code.

See Documentation/driver-model/platform.txt for more details.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
Signed-off-by: Magnus Damm <damm@igel.co.jp>
Cc: Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>
Cc: Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>
Cc: David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net>
Cc: Tejun Heo <htejun@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
2009-04-16 16:17:10 -07:00
..
acpi Merge branches 'release', 'APERF', 'ARAT', 'misc', 'kelvin', 'device-lock' and 'bjorn.notify' into release 2009-04-07 18:18:42 -04:00
asm-arm S3C24XX: Move and update IIS headers 2009-03-05 12:00:59 +00:00
asm-generic The default CONFIG_BUG=n version of BUG() should have an empty do...while 2009-04-15 13:55:13 -07:00
asm-h8300
asm-m32r Merge branch 'tracing-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/linux-2.6-tip 2009-04-05 11:04:19 -07:00
crypto crypto: zlib - New zlib crypto module, using pcomp 2009-03-04 15:16:19 +08:00
drm Merge branch 'drm-intel-next' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/anholt/drm-intel 2009-04-14 13:16:40 -07:00
keys
linux Driver Core: early platform driver 2009-04-16 16:17:10 -07:00
math-emu
media V4L/DVB (11381): ivtv/cx18: remove VIDIOC_INT_S_AUDIO_ROUTING debug support. 2009-04-06 21:44:28 -03:00
mtd make MTD headers use strict integer types 2009-03-26 18:14:17 +01:00
net ipv6: Fix NULL pointer dereference with time-wait sockets 2009-04-11 01:53:06 -07:00
pcmcia
rdma Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net-next-2.6 2009-03-26 15:54:36 -07:00
rxrpc
scsi PM/Hibernate: Wait for SCSI devices scan to complete during resume 2009-04-13 11:37:07 -07:00
sound Merge branch 'topic/hda' into for-linus 2009-04-15 11:24:09 +02:00
trace tracing/syscalls: use a dedicated file header 2009-04-09 05:43:32 +02:00
video include/video/cyblafb.h: remove it, it's unused 2009-04-13 15:04:30 -07:00
xen
Kbuild