Clarifications for platform_get_resource and devm_request_mem_region

[Amit Uttamchandani]

Hi,

I have been working on modifying drivers/net/ethoc.c to support
communication over an SPI bus. So far, I have successful in the basic
read/write ops and driver init. However, I am confused regarding
requesting system memory for the ethernet buffer descriptors. Here are
some of my questions regarding the following code snippet located in
ethoc_probe:

	/* obtain buffer memory space */
	res = platform_get_resource(pdev, IORESOURCE_MEM, 1);
	if (res) {
		mem = devm_request_mem_region(&pdev->dev, res->start,
			res->end - res->start + 1, res->name);
		if (!mem) {
			dev_err(&pdev->dev, "cannot request memory space\n");
			ret = -ENXIO;
			goto free;
		}

		netdev->mem_start = mem->start;
		netdev->mem_end   = mem->end;
	}

Note: The actual device is an FPGA device that connected to the CPU via
an SPI bus.

 1. I understand I can't use the platform_get_resource function for an
 SPI device but I can use the devm_request_mem_region by passing in hard
 coded values for the start and length of the mem region. The above code
 goes on to setup devm_ioremap_nocache and dma_alloc_coherent.

 However, I don't think I can use this for the SPI device since the
 above code assumes that the CPU has direct memory access to the FPGA
 correct?

 2. According to the free-electrons driver dev guide, platform_devices
 are only used for devices that are directly connected to the CPU and
 not over any bus. But it seems to me there are a lot of net drivers
 implemented in this fashion. Why is that so?

Thanks for any help.

Amit