[linux-dvb] Re: refactoring

[Andrew de Quincey <adq_dvb@lidskialf.net>]

> > > > And free the drivers private data.  And any other cleanups the driver
> > > > migth have to do depending on the hardware.  We certainly need a
> > > > detach function.
> > >
> > > There is no private data any longer.
> >
> > Yes, I've seen the code now.  Thats is a serve design bug.  The drivers
> > private data should not be public.  And it should be allocated and freed
> > by the driver itself and not by someone else.
>
> My take on this was that the demod drivers are meant to be as simple and as
> small as possible. I didn't really see the point in hiding the private data
> with this in mind.

Don't think of the demodulators as seperate drivers - they're not. The 
refactoring turns the "frontend drivers" into a library of routines used by 
specific card implementations. My view is that the card drivers should 
therefore allocate the memory needed by the library routines.

They're like the budget-core.c implementation in ttpci - all the budget 
implementations (budget-ci, budget-av etc) are responsible for allocating the 
memory used by the budget-core because its a set of shared routines used by 
them.