*Dons firefighting gear* Hello, This series introduces a bmc-misc-ctrl driver for exposing hardware interfaces provided by the BMC (Baseboard Management Controller) for scratch register communication between the host and the BMC, and other miscellaneous switches controlling BMC hardware features that can be exposed to the host. Previously Ben Herrenschmidt sent mail wanting to get some consensus on a good way forward: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/4/10/222 To summarise Ben's points: We have found that the controls we need to expose do not fit well into existing driver models for several reasons: 1. Not exposing the fields to userspace would instead mean encoding policy affecting the host system into the BMC kernel (typically scratch registers) 2. Some controls are so unique as to defy integration into other drivers 3. Exposing specific, well-constrained fields feels less evil than falling back to devmem. This series is one implementation of what we had in mind. My motivation is with respect to ASPEED BMC hardware but Dell have also indicated they would also make use of something similar for Nuvoton BMCs. To those ends, the implementation of bmc-misc-ctrl introduced here: 1. Uses devicetree to describe the miscellaneous fields and switches 2. Exposes the fields in sysfs via value/mask/set/clear attributes 3. Adds a 'bmc' class for the fields to aid discovery in userspace Now, the intent is bmc-misc-ctrl is used as a last resort. If features can sanely be exposed in more appropriate drivers, then that should (obviously) be done instead. I'm sending this out as an RFC as I'm sure people will have feedback. I hope it will be more constructive than 'NAK'. Thanks, Andrew Andrew Jeffery (4): dts: misc: Add bindings documentation for bmc-misc-ctrl Documentation: ABI: Add sysfs-class-bmc documentation to testing misc: Add bmc-misc-ctrl dts: aspeed-g5: Add bmc-misc-ctrl nodes to devicetree Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-class-bmc | 62 +++ .../bindings/misc/bmc-misc-ctrl.txt | 252 ++++++++++++ MAINTAINERS | 7 + arch/arm/boot/dts/aspeed-g5.dtsi | 192 +++++++++ drivers/misc/Kconfig | 8 + drivers/misc/Makefile | 1 + drivers/misc/bmc-misc-ctrl.c | 363 ++++++++++++++++++ 7 files changed, 885 insertions(+) create mode 100644 Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-class-bmc create mode 100644 Documentation/devicetree/bindings/misc/bmc-misc-ctrl.txt create mode 100644 drivers/misc/bmc-misc-ctrl.c -- 2.17.1 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe devicetree" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
