Right. I had a similar discussion about this the other day with Anton (I
think he forwarded it here but I wasn't subscribed at that point..). The
current ideology for device trees is to get rid of device_type for new
trees that aren't OF-based. I think it's relevant to give nodes fancy
names (i.e. not "timer" or even "ethernet") since the name property is
entirely descriptive in nature. I also think it's relevant that
device_type
still exists because since the name is totally irrelevant except from a
user-friendliness point of view, marking a device as a generic type is
quite important (device_type = serial, ethernet, rtc, keyboard) where
compatible properties are usually wildly over-specific.
I don't use device_type much, if at all, anymore. Generic name + compatible
just works better than device_type + specific name. When I write code that
has to find a node that is suitable for a given purpose, I look for the
existence
of suitable methods and perhaps other properties. I was just too hard to
keep the list of device_type values properly synchronized with all the
possible
things that you might want to infer from that set of names.
device_type is one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time,
but didn't work out as well as I had hoped.
_______________________________________________
Linuxppc-dev mailing list
Linuxppc-dev@ozlabs.org
https://ozlabs.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxppc-dev
