[RFC] [PATCH] Device Tree on ARM platform

[Russell King - ARM Linux]

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 03:13:55PM -0400, Jon Smirl wrote:
> On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 3:08 PM, Scott Wood <scottwood at freescale.com> wrote:
> > I'm not talking about platform specific code, I'm talking about code to
> > retrieve information about a device from the device tree.  There would not
> > be separate instances of this for "platforms X, Y and Z", just one
> > of_platform binding in each driver.  It's no different than having a
> > platform bus binding, except in the data structures used.
> >
> > But to restate, having external glue to create platform devices from the
> > device tree is fine if that's what you want to do.  We used to do that, but
> > it was a pain compared to keeping everything in one place.  Your experience
> > may differ.
> 
> Could 'struct platform_device' and 'struct of_platform_device" be
> unified into a single structure? It's personal preference whether the
> internal representation of the hardware is done via a device tree or
> snippets of platform code, but do we need to have to different device
> types?

That's a damned good question - platform devices have been around since
the dawn of the device model, so the real question which needs to be
asked is: what was the reason that of_platform_device created rather
than unifying it with the already provided platform_device ?

BTW, I can find no such struct "of_platform_device" in include/linux.
Is it specific to each and every OF implementation?