[RFC 0/7] Capebus; a bus for SoCs using simple expansion connectors

[Pantelis Antoniou]

Hi Russ,

On Oct 31, 2012, at 11:56 PM, Russ Dill wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 9:52 AM, Pantelis Antoniou
> <panto at antoniou-consulting.com> wrote:
>> Capebus is created to address the problem of many SoCs that can provide a
>> multitude of hardware interfaces but in order to keep costs down the main
>> boards only support a limited number of them. The rest are typically brought
>> out to pin connectors on to which other boards, named capes are connected and
>> allow those peripherals to be used.
>> 
>> These capes connect to the SoC interfaces but might also contain various other
>> parts that may need some kind of driver to work.
>> 
>> Since SoCs have limited pins and pin muxing options, not all capes can work
>> together so some kind of resource tracking (at least for the pins in use) is
>> required.
>> 
>> Before capebus all of this took place in the board support file, and frankly
>> for boards with too many capes it was becoming unmanageable.
>> 
>> Capebus provides a virtual bus, which along with a board specific controller,
>> cape drivers can be written using the standard Linux device model.
>> 
>> The core capebus infrastructure is not depended on any specific board.
>> However capebus needs a board controller to provide services to the cape devices
>> it controls. Services like addressing and resource reservation are provided
>> by the board controller.
>> 
>> Capebus at the moment only support TI's Beaglebone platform.
>> 
>> This RFC introduces the core concept; most supporting patches
>> have been posted to the relevant places.
> 
> There are quite a few TODOs in the code, any chance you could
> summarize them in the next header email?

Yes,

Most of them deal with dealing properly with removal of the board driver and the core
capebus stuff. And of course PM is not yet handled properly.

After I get on with this part of the review, I plan to fill in the docs and 
flesh out the TODOs more.

Regards

-- Pantelis