staging panel driver

Peter Huewe PeterHuewe at gmx.de
Thu Sep 3 18:49:08 UTC 2009


Hi,

Greg's post earlier today about the status of the staging tree drew my 
attention to the panel driver.
> - panel.  Another one that should be simple to merge.  Anyone?

And as I have some spare time on my hands and  
thought I might takeover this task - or atleast add some improvements. :)
I think this project might suit me well, as I already wrote some lcd-related 
drivers (e.g. for an powerpc eval board) and moreover I have one of these 
lcds here :)

I alread had a look at the source and before really getting started with it I 
want to discuss one of the issues in the TODO list:
        - see if all of this could be easier done in userspace instead.

My question is why not using lcdproc [1] instead - it can access keypads and 
HD44780-like 8-bit parallel LCDs.

So what do you think?

Willy, the author of the driver, answered my question like this:
> > Why didn't you just use lcdproc - it supports HD44780-like 8-bit parallel
> > LCD and Keypads.
>
> hey, just because lcdproc did not exist when I wrote this driver :-) It's
> 10 years old ! Also, in userspace you can't display kernel messages and
> you can't easily emulate a device. Here, it's pretty easy to run a
> menu-based interface in a shell script :
>
>   while :; do
>      read key
>      case key in
>        'Up') ...
>      ...
>      esac
>      echo "Blah"
>   done </dev/keypad >/dev/lcd
>
> I did not push for the driver to be included, a user proposed to do so,
> so the driver got merged. Since it was in horrible shape, I sent a few
> cleanup patches to Greg (among which some used to remove the smartcard
> driver).

I'm looking forward to your replies ;)

Thanks,
Peter






More information about the devel mailing list