instance, to configure early timers and early serial ports we cannot use platform devices. This because the setup order during boot. Timers are needed before the platform driver core code is available. The same goes for early printk support. Early in this case means before initcalls. These early drivers today have their configuration either hard coded or they receive it using some special configuration method. This is working quite well, but if we want to support both regular kernel modules and early devices then we need to have two ways of configuring the same driver. A single way would be better. The early platform driver patch is basically a set of functions that allow drivers to register themselves and architecture code to locate them and probe. Registration happens through early_param(). The time for the probe is decided by the architecture code. See Documentation/driver-model/platform.txt for more details. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes] Signed-off-by: Magnus Damm Cc: Paul Mundt Cc: Kay Sievers Cc: David Brownell Cc: Tejun Heo Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman ã