Hello Peter, On 3/3/2015 5:35 PM, Peter Stuge wrote: > Hello Joao, > > Joao Pinto wrote: >> This new feature basically is to turn the relationship between driver >> and hardware IP more transparent, making the software more robust. > > This is an important matter already today, and will only become more > important in the future. > > >> a) The hardware has the capability of supplying to the driver the >> IP version and crucial features that it support or not >> b) The driver would read the hardware capability features and work >> without hick-ups even if the developer has configured him (e.g. >> menuconfig during build process) to do some specific thing that >> is not supported by the current connected hardware > > Once the driver supports auto-detecting these features, I think that > the manual configuration shall be removed. In my opinion a manual configuration should always exist to give the kernel user to enable/disable some features of the driver. > > >> c) If the driver is configured to do something that the connected >> hardware is not capable of doing, it simply logs a message to >> kernel log and automatically disables it trying to work has >> fluid as possible > > How the driver reacts in this situation is a matter of policy, which > should probably not be specific to any one driver, but should > probably be set at a slightly higher level, perhaps even by the > person configuring/building the kernel. I agree with you. > > >> d) If the hardware does not have the capability of supplying >> information of this type to the driver, than it should work >> according to the configuration > > Hm? Can you be more specific? If it is *possible* for the combination > of hardware+driver to work according to the configuration, why would > the driver ever do anything else? > A company that develops hardware IP can develop a driver that has special features that are specific to its IP. Imagine a USB super speed mode that is only supported by company X hardware IP. If in the future a peripheral connects to a PC using Linux that uses the hardware IP of company X, the driver will automatically recognize it and enable the special mode if configured to do so. > >> In your opinion this feature would be a value-added to a new >> driver / existent driver? > > In general I feel strongly that hardware and drivers must stay close > to each other, but some of the things you described are not > completely clear to me, so it is difficult to give specific feedback. > > Can you provide more details? Please check above comments. > > > Thanks > > //Peter > Thanks for your time! Joao -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-usb" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
