Two drivers, one physical device: How to deal with that?

[Andre Albsmeier]

On Wed, 21-Jan-2009 at 08:47:05 -0500, John Baldwin wrote:
> On Monday 29 December 2008 7:35:21 pm Jeff Roberson wrote:
> > On Mon, 29 Dec 2008, Andre Albsmeier wrote:
> > 
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > I have written a driver which attaches to the host bridge in
> > > order to periodically read the appropriate registers and
> > > inform the user about ECC errors (ECC-Monitor). No I have
> > > run across a mainboard where the host bridge is already
> > > taken by the agp driver. Of course, I can detach the agp
> > > driver and attach myself and everything is working but
> > > what is if someone does not want to loose the agp
> > > functionality?
> > >
> > > How does one deal with the case when two separate drivers
> > > have to access the same device (the host bridge in my case)?
> > >
> > > I assume, the correct way would be to join the AGP and
> > > ECC functionality in one driver but maybe there are other
> > > tricks I am not aware of?
> > 
> > Well I don't think it would be correct to merge two conceptually seperate 
> > drivers into one just to share the same device.  It sounds like the right 
> > solution is to make a generic layer the attaches to the host bridge and 
> > arbitrates access to it.  Then allow other device to find and communicate 
> > with this generic layer.  For the host bridge this doesn't have to be 
> > particularly fancy.
> 
> This is already the case in 7.0 and later where hostb(4) always attaches to 
> host bridges and agp(4) attaches to the hostb(4) devices.

Thanks for the hint. I will try this as soon as I got
my first 7.x system running.

	-Andre

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