I'm interested in expanding the current support for the it87 Super I/O chip to provide access to more of its capabilities. I started by looking at two existing drivers which talk to different parts of the chip. Maybe I'm missing something, but what guarantees that both of these drivers won't attempt to talk to the chip at the same time?
The watchdog/it8712f_wdt.c driver has an internal spinlock, the hwmon/it87.c driver doesn't, and I don't see how a lock could be shared across both unless it is taken care of at a lower level that I'm not aware of. You can see that code is essentially copied between the two files to talk to the chip. This brings me to a more general question regarding SuperI/O chips. Since these chips touch many different parts of traditionally separate driver areas, how should the drivers be structured so that they can all talk to the chip? Should the low level communications routines for the chip live in a library which all the drivers could use? Should all of the created devices live inside one file? (e.g. platform/it87.c instead of hwmon, watchdog, etc) Thanks, -Andrew -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
