Throughout the development of the 2.5 kernel, a number of drivers and pieces of infrastructure that had been left to stagnate finally got a long overdue cleanup. In some cases, code that hadn't been touched for several years got overhauled. Each time another area got the cleanup treatment, patterns started to emerge.

This paper attempts to document some of these patterns so that hopefully by keeping them in mind, future driver authors don't fall into the pitfalls that some of these have fixed up such as over-abstracting, and massive duplication. By way of examples, it covers several areas that got cleaned up in the 2.5 series, but focuses on the bulk of the work the paper author did on the agpgart driver.

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