OF compatible MTD platform RAM driver ?

Laurent Pinchart laurentp at cse-semaphore.com
Thu Mar 27 10:31:34 EDT 2008


On Thursday 27 March 2008 11:03, David Gibson wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 10:13:32AM +0100, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > On Wednesday 26 March 2008 13:53, Sergei Shtylyov wrote:
> > > Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> [snip]
> > >     Heh, we've gone thru "physmap" before -- it was labelled
> > >     Linux-specific name (well, I'd agree with that).
> > 
> > physmap stands for physically mapped. That doesn't sound
> > Linux-specific to me, the fact that the MTD driver has the same name
> > is a pure coincidence.  linmap-rom and linmap-rom sound even more
> > Linux-specific :-)
> 
> It may not be Linux specific per se, but it's a bad name, because the
> fact that the device is physically direct mapped isn't a useful
> distinguishing feature of the device.  Main memory is also direct
> physically mapped, after all, but that's not what you want to cover
> with this description.  In general how a device is wired is described
> by where it sits in the tree, not by its properties.
> 
> It only seems like a usefully distinguishing name because it's the
> Linux "physmap_of" driver that uses it.  So in this sense it is a
> Linux specific name after all.  In fact, physmap_of is itself very
> badly named - right now it only handles direct mapped mtds, but that's
> not inherent; it could be trivially extended to also instantiate a
> non-direct-mapped device (as long as the underlying mtd layer
> supported it, of course).  It bears no relation at all to the
> "physmap" driver, except historical accident.
> 
> > Could we agree on a name ? I'd like to submit a new patch.
> 
> For ROMs I think just plain "rom" should be sufficient.  For RAMs we
> need something to indicate that it's memory but intended for secondary
> storage, not as main memory.  Unfortunately, I'm finding myself unable
> to think of something.

What about "storage-ram", "auxiliary-ram", "secondary-ram", "application-ram",
"user-ram" or "ramdisk" ?

-- 
Laurent Pinchart
CSE Semaphore Belgium

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