On Tue, 6 Sep 2005, Tom Rini wrote: > > Yep, it's an excuse for platform maintainers not to write proper drivers. > > I talked with Al about this off list a bit, and pointed out it's > different than it appears. GEN_RTC really is a mostly-generic RTC > driver. There's some fakey stuff going on for UIE (all under > GEN_RTC_X), but the real meat of the driver is common export get/set > time and per-arch (which can abstract further, see ppc32) poke the > hardware for the time. There's 2 (afaik) problems, one being a lack of > alarm support, and the other being hardware access isn't (today) > abstracted out far enough for i2c stuff to work.
The generic problem with the generic driver is it only supports the bare minimum an RTC might support and no way to provide access to what more sophisticated hardware may implement (e.g. an IRQ). There is simply no room for that in the API. And I have seen proposals for reducing the MC146818 to GEN_RTC, too... It's certainly good enough for simple implementations of RTCs, like a battery backed-up 32-bit register counting milliseconds since the beginning of the year (a so-called TOY clock). Maciej - 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/
