Re: driver location for platform-specific drivers

[Mike Mackovitch]

On Mon, Feb 11, 2002 at 01:17:44PM -0600, John Hesterberg wrote:
> 
> For SGI's upcoming Linux platform (nicknamed Scalable Node, or SN),
> we have some platform specific device drivers.  Where should these go?
> I see several precedents in the current kernels.
> 
> [...]
> 
>     2) Company (sgi) directory.
>        There is already an sgi directory, strangely enough.
>        I *think* this was meant to be a platform directory for the
>        discontinued SGI 320/540 Visual Workstations.  However, maybe

You are mistaken.  The cruft in drivers/sgi mostly dates back to the
attempts on the SGI Indy platform to get SGI's IRIX X server *binary*
running under Linux (note that this work was NOT done by SGI).

The SGI Visual Workstation work was mostly done within the i386 arch
code; the framebuffer driver (sgivwfb.[ch]) was put in drivers/video;
and some other drivers had some modifications that were guarded
by CONFIG_VISWS or CONFIG_VISWS_HACKS.  (There was also a project that
enabled multi-process accelerated/direct-rendered graphics on that
platform, but that code was never released due to the fact that the
project was killed the week it was demonstrated at SIGGRAPH'99.)

--macko