RE: [PATCH 1/2]Intel Moorestown NAND driver patch for mainline

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>]

On Tue, 2009-06-23 at 18:59 +0800, Gao, Yunpeng wrote:
> Hi Greg, David and Alan,
> 
> I have discussed with the architect of Moorestown NAND driver today,
> and we agreed that the Moorestown NAND driver can not be ported to MTD
> subsystem.
> The reason is: 
> The NAND driver has to keep compatibility with Moorestown IA Firmware
> (which also operates on NAND device and is close source), and if the
> NAND driver is ported to MTD, the driver has to be changed much and
> thus will fail to keep the compatibility with Firmware.
> 
> As this is a standalone NAND driver, I think I can re-submit it to the
> block subsystem (maintained by Jens Axboe). Thus the NAND driver need
> not to change its architecture and can keep the compatibility with
> Firmware.
> 
> Also, it'll be better if the NAND driver can be in Greg's staging tree
> before the driver becomes 'good enough' and accepted by the block
> subsystem. Because some customers and partners want to get the latest
> NAND driver code from the kernel tree before the driver is accepted
> finally.
> 
> Does this suggestion make sense?

None whatsoever.

There is absolutely no reason why integrating properly with the MTD
subsystem would prevent you from retaining on-medium compatibility with
the firmware. We manage it for DiskOnChip devices, for example.

-- 
David Woodhouse                            Open Source Technology Centre
David.Woodhouse@intel.com                              Intel Corporation