ARM topic: Is DT on ARM the solution, or is there something better?

[Mark Brown]

On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 04:29:21PM +0100, Thierry Reding wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 01:57:27PM +0000, Mark Brown wrote:

> > You'd need something class based like USB, there's such massive
> > variation in what the hardware is trying to do and the tradeoffs.  A big
> > issue is that especially with I2C many of the devices are primarily
> > analogue devices implemnted in larger processes where the cost of adding
> > additional digital logic can have a noticeable effect on the area and
> > hence cost of the silicon.

> My comments were mostly regarding the interface controllers. Those which
> generate the same bus transactions but need different drivers on every
> SoC. I suspect that the same costs don't apply (or at least not to the
> same extent) to SoCs.

Oh, right.  In that space I suspect you'd face apathy on the part of
vendors for switching away from their existing validated and deployed
IPs - probably the best shot would be a freely licensed reference
implementation that people could pick up if they wanted.  It's plausible
that some of the vendors might do so for SPI where there are a bunch of
chips that don't have DMA/FIFOs yet and so could possibly benefit from
performance and feature gains but without that sort of benefit it's hard
to see what would be persuasive for the vendors.
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