This was intended to be a minor band-aid. ;)
We already have request_resource(), which does something
different than the request_*region() calls. I think calls
with those names would complicate an already-too-strange
interface, adding oddball siblings to request_resource().
I'd hope that when those resource calls were defined they
made sense ... but to me, they don't do so today. Consider
that the *typical* caller is given a "struct resource", and
then to claim the specified address space it must convert
it into a "start + length" representation before getting
back a *NEW* "struct resource" ... with identical contents,
other than the value of one all-but-undocumented flag bit.
Then, if it's I/O space the address is usable already; but
for memory space, it still needs an ioremap()...
Oh, and PCI has its own resource structs ("BAR") that don't
look or act the same as other resources.
So while I like the notion of starting to abolish that
conversion step, this wasn't an attempt to fix all the
bizarre behaviors of the resource API.
I could imagine a call taking a resource and returning
a "void __iomem *" to use for IO, which implicitly claims
the region (in either memory or i/o space) and does any
ioremap needed for memory space. With a sibling call to
undo all that. If that's the answer, someone else should
develop the patch and update drivers...
- Dave
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