[Cbe-oss-dev] Axon End Point (axonep.ko) driver for review: patch file 1 of 1

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Monday 07 April 2008, H Brett Bolen wrote:

> OK. Can the axonmbx driver create the axon mbx devices?  I can envision
> a function exported by the base/bus driver:
> 
>         axon_create_device( struct some_id, <blah> ...);
> 
> This way the base driver does not need to know what kinds of child
> device drivers may be written in the future.  I guess it is not
> really needed, because the base driver is open source -- and a
> driver developer can always add a new device type to the bus
> driver itself.

It depends on what the driver actually does. Normally, the bus
driver should only create devices that are physically present, and
then have other drivers bind to them.

If a device is just made up by the driver creating it, it may
be better not to have a device at all for it, but just export
symbols from the base driver that are called as library functions
from the new driver.

In case of the network driver, it sounds reasonable to create
the device from the driver itself, because the network layer
expects to have a physical device.

> Arnd,  Should these discussions be forward to the cbeoss list?

Yes, that is usually a good idea.

	Arnd <><