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Message-id: <alpine.LFD.1.00.0802202226000.2732@xanadu.home>
Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:28:59 -0500 (EST)
From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@....org>
To: Magnus Damm <magnus.damm@...il.com>
Cc: netdev@...r.kernel.org, lethal@...ux-sh.org,
akpm@...ux-foundation.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 02/04] smc91x: introduce platform data flags
On Thu, 21 Feb 2008, Magnus Damm wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 12:58 AM, Nicolas Pitre <nico@....org> wrote:
> > On Wed, 20 Feb 2008, Magnus Damm wrote:
> >
> > > This patch introduces struct smc91x_platdata and modifies the driver so
> > > bus width is checked during run time using SMC_nBIT() instead of
> > > SMC_CAN_USE_nBIT.
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Magnus Damm <damm@...l.co.jp>
> > > ---
> >
> > NAK.
> >
> > The SMC91C111 (for example) is often used on devices which have a CPU
> > clock barely higher than the network throughput, hence it is crutial for
> > those devices to have the most efficient access possible to the chip or
> > performance will suffer. This is the main reason behind the heavily
> > macroized register access so things are always optimized for the data
> > bus capabilities at compile time.
>
> I understand that you want to keep the code as fast as possible. So do
> I. But I want to remove the need to modify smc91x.h for each board I
> want to support. It is much better in my opinion to have a wide range
> of boards supported but a little bit lower throughput compared to only
> a few boards supported and excellent performance... People can always
> modify the header file by themselves if they want to squeeze out that
> extra percent of performance.
Sure. That's perfectly fine for new boards. But existing setups should
not regress due to this change.
> > I think you should add a SMC_DYNAMIC_BUS_CONFIG and redefine SMC_nBITS()
> > so they dereference cfg.flags only when it is defined.
>
> Sure, good idea. I'll fix that. Do you mind if I make that the default
> behavior? So boards that doesn't have any hard coded configuration in
> smc91x.h can use the platform data flags method for configuration
> instead.
Yes, that's fine.
Nicolas
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