On Wednesday 20 April 2011, Guenter Roeck wrote: > On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 12:44:30PM -0400, Arnd Bergmann wrote: > > On Tuesday 19 April 2011, Guenter Roeck wrote: > > > This driver adds support for Si570, Si571, Si598, and Si599 > > > programmable XO/VCXO. > > > > > > Signed-off-by: Guenter Roeck <guenter.roeck@xxxxxxxxxxxx> > > > > This needs some more explanation of what the hardware is there for, > > and why it's unlike everything else that we support in Linux. > > > This is a generic configurable clock device. I'll be happy to add > some text such as "The device can be used for any application requiring > a static or a dynamically configurable clock, such as serdes clocks". > Not sure if that would add much value, though. > > Regarding "unlike everything else", not sure if that is really correct. > The DDS chips Jonathan mentioned do get pretty close, and there are > other drivers providing support for clock chips, though typically more > dedicated. ics932s401 in misc is one example, and then there are all > the tuner chips in media/common/tuners/. Isn't that what you'd normally call a 'struct clk' then? > > If that is true, it should probably not have a user-visible > > interface, but only an interface that can be used by other > > kernel drivers. > > > Depends. In our case, turns out the devices consuming the clock > have user mode drivers. Lots of history there, but the chip vendors > provide those user mode drivers, and the teams responsible for > integrating the drivers decided to not rewrite it to kernel mode drivers. > Also, for special purposes such as margining, it is necessary to control > the clock from userspace. So, for our use case, I need the user-visible > interface. I _don't_ need the kernel interface, at least not right now, > which is why I did not add it. > > Browsing through the web, it seems the chip is somewhat popular with > Amateur Radio. No idea if it would ever be controlled for such a purpose > from Linux, but if so, it would also require a user configurable frequency. > > If there is a better place for such a driver than misc, please let me know. When you say user mode driver, do you mean as in drivers/uio? (taking Hans on Cc for these) Those already have generic support for memory and interrupt resources, maybe we can just add a common way to associate a uio device with a struct clk and provide a sysfs or ioctl interface to set a clock for a given device. Arnd -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-i2c" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
