Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] SiFive RISC-V GPIO Device

[Peter Maydell]

On Wed, 13 Feb 2019 at 18:54, Thomas Huth <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On 2019-02-13 18:14, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > On Wed, 13 Feb 2019 at 00:13, Alistair Francis <address@hidden> wrote:
> >> I know the other RISC-V files don't do it, but this should go in the
> >> hw/gpio directory instead of hw/riscv.
> >
> > It might be nice to move those existing riscv devices into
> > their proper places at some point: should be a fairly easy
> > cleanup patch if somebody wants to take it on. (Advice
> > on what should live where available on request.)
>
> If devices only work on riscv, they should IMHO stay in hw/riscv/. I
> think hw/gpio/ and friends should primarily be used if a device is
> shared between architectures. If they stay in hw/riscv/ it is way easier
> to match the devices with wildcards in the MAINTAINERS file. Just my
> 0.02 € only, of course.

This is not the way we generally arrange the source tree,
at least not the parts I'm familiar with. The rule of
thumb I use is that devices of type X go in hw/X, and
hw/$ARCH is only for board models and SoC container objects.
I think the model for this is the Linux kernel, which
splits drivers for devices into directories by device
family, rather than putting them all in arch/whatever.
A split that puts all the architecture-specific device
models in hw/$ARCH has the significant disadvantage that
it would put a huge number of files in hw/arm ...

(More generally, I don't think the exact way we split
the source files between directories matters much, but
I do think it helps if we try to be consistent about it.)

thanks
-- PMM