Re: [PATCH] Kconfig fix (GEN_RTC dependencies)

[Tom Rini <trini@kernel.crashing.org>]

On Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 07:06:25PM +0100, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> 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...

Yes, that's in some ways a feature.  Personally I tie IRQ support to
alarm, but perhaps that's just my lack of exposure.

-- 
Tom Rini
http://gate.crashing.org/~trini/