[alsa-devel] [PATCH v2 1/3] ALSA SoC: Add OpenFirmware helper for matching bus and codec drivers

[Mark Brown]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 11:21:12AM -0600, Grant Likely wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 10:53 AM, Mark Brown

> > Incidentally, nobody ever really commented on my suggestion to do
> > something DMI-like

> I'm feeling stupid;  what does "DMI" stand for?

Desktop Management Interface, a standard BIOS interface for getting
system data on x86 class hardware.  Of particular interest here is the
fact that it contains various ID strings for things like motherboard and
chassis - on Linux drivers can be automatically loaded based on these
strings.  See drivers/misc/thinkpad_acpi.c for an example of a driver
that does this.

Note that it's *not* binding a driver,  it just provides the hooks to
enable the modules to be automatically loaded and to let drivers query
information in DMI.

> Yes, we have APIs for matching against device trees.  Personally, I'm
> leaning towards having the powerpc platform code
> (arch/powerpc/platforms/* stuff; not ASoC platform stuff) register a
> platform device for the machine driver and let as many machine drivers
> as needed be written.  Hopefully we'll be able to do at least one

That would be what I'd expected initially - it is, after all, what other
platforms are doing here.

> generic machine driver that will be usable by most PowerPC boards, but
> I don't think it is a requirement or even realistic to shoehorn all
> powerpc sound circuits into a single driver.

Yes, that'd be completely unrealistic.

> > I don't mind - you can call it what you like inside PowerPC-specific
> > code.

> Oh help!  Don't tell us that!  Otherwise we'll always be talking
> across purposes.  When ambiguous, let's just be sure to always refer
> to them as "ASoC machine drivers".  :-)

Feh, from now on I shall me naming all new concepts with pwgen :) .