Re: adt7xxx drivers (Was Re: Device name length restriction?)

[Nicolas Joly <njoly%pasteur.fr@localhost>]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 08:13:20AM -0700, Paul Goyette wrote:
> Having looked more at both the adt7463 and adt7467 drivers, as well as 
> writing a new(ish) driver for the adt7475, it occurs to me that all of 
> these drivers are for a single chip family and that the drivers are (or 
> can be) nearly identical, save for the specific set of sensors 
> supported.  It seems to me that we could rather easily merge all of 
> these drivers into a single addbc (for "Analog Devices dbCool") driver, 
> detect the specific chip based on on-chip register contents (location 
> is common to all of these drivers), and select the appropriate set of 
> sensors from a chip-specific table.  There are a number of additional 
> chips in the dbCool family, and having a single driver would make it 
> easier to support more of them, at a small cost of some table space in 
> the kernel.
> 
> While I'm at it, I noticed that the adt7467 driver has a sysctl node to 
> enable read/write of the Tmin registers (used to set the threshold of 
> when fans should be sped up).  Currently this sysctl lives under the 
> machdep top-level node;  I'm assuming this is because the original 7467 
> driver was intended only for the MacBook on which it was found.  I 
> suspect that a more appropriate place for this sysctl is under the hw 
> top-level node.
> 
> Comments?  Is it worthwhile to merge these drivers?  Worth the cost of 
> the tables?  And should the sysctl be moved to hw.<dev_name>.xxx or 
> leave it at machdep.<dev_name>.xxx ?

Yes, please. I already thought about it, but never got enough spare
time to proceed.

-- 
Nicolas Joly

Biological Software and Databanks.
Institut Pasteur, Paris.