[PATCH v2 07/27] PCI: Add software-emulated host bridge

[Jason Gunthorpe]

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 03:03:55PM -0700, Stephen Warren wrote:
> On 01/28/2013 01:18 PM, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > On Monday 28 January 2013, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:
> >> From: Thierry Reding <thierry.reding at avionic-design.de>
> >>
> >> [Thomas Petazzoni:
> >>  - Simplify capabilities handling.
> >>  - Move to a separate file.
> >>  - Fix mask used when writing a 4 bytes value.]
> >>
> >> Signed-off-by: Thierry Reding <thierry.reding at avionic-design.de>
> >> Signed-off-by: Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni at free-electrons.com>
> > 
> > Not even a description why this is needed?
> > 
> > This patch (together with patch 8) seems like the most controversial
> > one of the series, so you should better provide a really good reason
> > why we would emulate something in software rather than using whatever
> > hardware is there.
> 
> At least on Tegra, there is no HW that exposes PCI configuration
> registers for the host bridge itself. Only the root ports have exposed
> PCI configuration registers. There was some debate re: whether a host
> bridge device needed to exist or not. This patch makes such a device
> exist if it's required.

If Linux will discover properly (I strongly suspect it does) without
the host bridge, then I would say to ditch this...

The PCI-E standard requires a host bridge device, but if Linux doesn't
require it then there is no reason to emulate one.

That would simplify the question of PCI IDs - for Marvell's case and
the sw root port bridge we can just copy the IDs from the bogus config
space of the HW.

Jason