The "Serial Peripheral Interface" is a low level synchronous
protocol. Chips that support SPI can have data transfer rates
up to several tens of Mbit/sec. Chips are addressed with a
controller and a chipselect. Most SPI slaves don't support
dynamic device discovery; some are even write-only or read-only.

SPI is widely used by microcontrollers to talk with sensors,
eeprom and flash memory, codecs and various other controller
chips, analog to digital (and d-to-a) converters, and more.
MMC and SD cards can be accessed using SPI protocol; and for
DataFlash cards used in MMC sockets, SPI must always be used.

SPI is one of a family of similar protocols using a four wire
interface (select, clock, data in, data out) including Microwire
(half duplex), SSP, SSI, and PSP. This driver framework should
work with most such devices and controllers.

source code:

arch/mips/txx9/generic/spi_eeprom.c