Date:	Fri, 15 May 2015 10:09:14 +0200
From:	Maxime Ripard <maxime.ripard@...e-electrons.com>
To:	Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>
Cc:	Mark Brown <broonie@...nel.org>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	Hans de Goede <hdegoede@...hat.com>,
	linux-spi@...r.kernel.org, Martin Sperl <kernel@...tin.sperl.org>,
	Michal Suchanek <hramrach@...il.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] spi: Force the registration of the spidev devices

On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 03:33:31PM -0700, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 09:26:40PM +0200, Maxime Ripard wrote:
> > On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 11:17:36AM -0700, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > > On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 07:50:34PM +0200, Maxime Ripard wrote:
> > > > Hi Greg,
> > > > 
> > > > On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 08:37:40AM -0700, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
> > > > > On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 12:26:04PM +0100, Mark Brown wrote:
> > > > > > On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 10:33:24PM +0200, Maxime Ripard wrote:
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > > While this is nicer than the DT solution because of its accurate hardware
> > > > > > > representation, it's still not perfect because you might not have access to the
> > > > > > > DT, or you might be driving a completely generic device (such as a
> > > > > > > microcontroller) that might be used for something else in a different
> > > > > > > context/board.
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > Greg, you're copied on this because this seems to be a generic problem
> > > > > > that should perhaps be solved at a driver model level - having a way to
> > > > > > bind userspace access to devices that we don't otherwise have a driver
> > > > > > for.  The subsystem could specify the UIO driver to use when no other
> > > > > > driver is available.
> > > > > 
> > > > > That doesn't really work.  I've been talking to the ACPI people about
> > > > > this, and the problem is "don't otherwise have a driver for" is an
> > > > > impossible thing to prove, as you never know when a driver is going to
> > > > > be loaded from userspace.
> > > > > 
> > > > > You can easily bind drivers to devices today from userspace, why not
> > > > > just use the built-in functionality you have today if you "know" that
> > > > > there is no driver for this hardware.
> > > > 
> > > > What we're really after here is that we want to have an spidev
> > > > instance when we don't even have a device.
> > > 
> > > That's crazy, just create a device, things do not work without one.
> > 
> > Our use case is this one: we want to export spidev files so that "dev
> > boards" with a header that allows to plug virtually anything on it
> > (Raspberry Pi, Cubieboards, Xplained, and all the likes) without
> > having to change the kernel and / or device tree.
> 
> You want to do that on a bus that is not self-describing or dynamic?
> I too want a pony.  Please go kick the hardware engineer who designed
> such a mess, we solved this problem 20+ years ago with "real" busses.

Well, we do have such ponies on some bus that don't have any kind of
enumeration. i2cdev allows to do just that already. That would seem
logical to have a similar behaviour for SPI.

> > That would mean that if we plug something to that port, no device will
> > be created because the DT itself won't have that device declared in
> > the first place.
> 
> Because you can't dynamically determine that something was plugged in,
> of course.

Well.. Yeah.

> 
> > This patch is actually doing this: creating a new device for all the
> > chipselects that are not in use that will be bound to the spidev
> > driver.
> 
> I have yet to see a patch...

You were in Cc of that patch, which is the first message in this thread.

Maxime

-- 
Maxime Ripard, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com

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