[PATCH v3 00/27] Add support for OpenCAPI Persistent Memory devices

[Alastair D'Silva]

On Mon, 2020-02-24 at 17:51 +1100, Oliver O'Halloran wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 3:43 PM Alastair D'Silva <
> alastair at au1.ibm.com> wrote:
> > On Sun, 2020-02-23 at 20:37 -0800, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > > On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 03:34:07PM +1100, Alastair D'Silva wrote:
> > > > V3:
> > > >   - Rebase against next/next-20200220
> > > >   - Move driver to arch/powerpc/platforms/powernv, we now
> > > > expect
> > > > this
> > > >     driver to go upstream via the powerpc tree
> > > 
> > > That's rather the opposite direction of normal; mostly drivers
> > > live
> > > under
> > > drivers/ and not in arch/.  It's easier for drivers to get
> > > overlooked
> > > when doing tree-wide changes if they're hiding.
> > 
> > This is true, however, given that it was not all that desirable to
> > have
> > it under drivers/nvdimm, it's sister driver (for the same hardware)
> > is
> > also under arch, and that we don't expect this driver to be used on
> > any
> > platform other than powernv, we think this was the most reasonable
> > place to put it.
> 
> Historically powernv specific platform drivers go in their respective
> subsystem trees rather than in arch/ and I'd prefer we kept it that
> way. When I added the papr_scm driver I put it in the pseries
> platform
> directory because most of the pseries paravirt code lives there for
> some reason; I don't know why. Luckily for me that followed the same
> model that Dan used when he put the NFIT driver in drivers/acpi/ and
> the libnvdimm core in drivers/nvdimm/ so we didn't have anything to
> argue about. However, as Matthew pointed out, it is at odds with how
> most subsystems operate. Is there any particular reason we're doing
> things this way or should we think about moving libnvdimm users to
> drivers/nvdimm/?
> 
> Oliver


I'm not too fussed where it ends up, as long as it ends up somewhere :)

>From what I can tell, the issue is that we have both "infrastructure"
drivers, and end-device drivers. To me, it feels like drivers/nvdimm
should contain both, and I think this feels like the right approach.

I could move it back to drivers/nvdimm/ocxl, but I felt that it was
only tolerated there, not desired. This could be cleared up with a
response from Dan Williams, and if it is indeed dersired, this is my
preferred location.

I think a case could also be made for drivers/ocxl, simply because we
don't expect more than a handful of drivers to ever live there (I
expect most users will drive their devices from userspace via libocxl).

In defence of keeping it in arch/powerpc/powernv, I highly doubt this
driver will end up being used on any platform other than this. Even
though OpenCAPI was engineered as an open standard, there is some
competition from industry giants with a competing standard on a much
more popular platform.

-- 
Alastair D'Silva
Open Source Developer
Linux Technology Centre, IBM Australia
mob: 0423 762 819