@@ -64,6 +64,49 @@ If the driver needs to perform more complex initialization like getting and
6464configuring GPIOs it can get its ACPI handle and extract this information
6565from ACPI tables.
6666
67+ ACPI device objects
68+ ===================
69+
70+ Generally speaking, there are two categories of devices in a system in which
71+ ACPI is used as an interface between the platform firmware and the OS: Devices
72+ that can be discovered and enumerated natively, through a protocol defined for
73+ the specific bus that they are on (for example, configuration space in PCI),
74+ without the platform firmware assistance, and devices that need to be described
75+ by the platform firmware so that they can be discovered. Still, for any device
76+ known to the platform firmware, regardless of which category it falls into,
77+ there can be a corresponding ACPI device object in the ACPI Namespace in which
78+ case the Linux kernel will create a struct acpi_device object based on it for
79+ that device.
80+
81+ Those struct acpi_device objects are never used for binding drivers to natively
82+ discoverable devices, because they are represented by other types of device
83+ objects (for example, struct pci_dev for PCI devices) that are bound to by
84+ device drivers (the corresponding struct acpi_device object is then used as
85+ an additional source of information on the configuration of the given device).
86+ Moreover, the core ACPI device enumeration code creates struct platform_device
87+ objects for the majority of devices that are discovered and enumerated with the
88+ help of the platform firmware and those platform device objects can be bound to
89+ by platform drivers in direct analogy with the natively enumerable devices
90+ case. Therefore it is logically inconsistent and so generally invalid to bind
91+ drivers to struct acpi_device objects, including drivers for devices that are
92+ discovered with the help of the platform firmware.
93+
94+ Historically, ACPI drivers that bound directly to struct acpi_device objects
95+ were implemented for some devices enumerated with the help of the platform
96+ firmware, but this is not recommended for any new drivers. As explained above,
97+ platform device objects are created for those devices as a rule (with a few
98+ exceptions that are not relevant here) and so platform drivers should be used
99+ for handling them, even though the corresponding ACPI device objects are the
100+ only source of device configuration information in that case.
101+
102+ For every device having a corresponding struct acpi_device object, the pointer
103+ to it is returned by the ACPI_COMPANION() macro, so it is always possible to
104+ get to the device configuration information stored in the ACPI device object
105+ this way. Accordingly, struct acpi_device can be regarded as a part of the
106+ interface between the kernel and the ACPI Namespace, whereas device objects of
107+ other types (for example, struct pci_dev or struct platform_device) are used
108+ for interacting with the rest of the system.
109+
67110DMA support
68111===========
69112
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