RFC: representing sdio devices oob interrupt, clks, etc. in device tree
From: Hans de Goede <hidden>
Date: 2014-05-24 10:06:30
Also in:
linux-devicetree, linux-mmc
Hi, On 05/23/2014 06:27 PM, Mark Brown wrote:
On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 01:50:40PM +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:quoted
On 05/23/2014 01:22 PM, Mark Brown wrote:quoted
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Would it not be better to have this be something in the driver struct rather than in the device tree? Putting a compatible in there would be encoding details of the Linux implementation in the DT which doesn't seem right especially since these are details we're thinking of changing later on.quoted
The compatible is not a Linux specific thing, it is a marking saying that something needs to take care of enabling the clks (and whatever else we will make part of the binding for this compatible), before scanning the mmc bus.We could just say that the mere presence of a child node with the right properties is sufficient to trigger the bus to do the startup?
Yes, except that most involved property names are standardized, ie clocks, and we want to be able to opt out of the KISS mmc core code for (future) complex power on sequences.
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Something like have the driver set flags saying if it wants to do complicated things.quoted
Chicken <-> egg, we won't know which driver to use before we've probed the mmc bus, and we cannot probe the bus before enabling the clks, etc.If the device is sufficiently complicated to need a special power up sequence I'd expect we'd be able to have a compatible string which would provide enough information for us to figure things out.
Hmm, so what you're suggesting is indeed more of an opt out then my initial opt-in to KISS powerup idea. So to be clear what you're suggesting is: mmc core walks host mmc-child nodes. Loads drivers based on compatibles there. The checks a flag field in the driver to see if the driver wants to opt-out of the KISS powerup code. The problem with this is that it won't work reliable with modules, think the mmc probe being done from the ramdisk, and the driver in question only being available from the rootfs. I really believe that using opt-in with a compatible such as simple-sdio-powerup is by far the safest thing to do, and as an added advantage we don't need to worry about how to deal with the future complex power on cases at all, we leave all the room in the world for various future scenarios. since as soon as the simple-sdio-powerup compatible is not there the mmc core will behave as it does today.
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FWIW if we ever get truely complex cases I think modeling the power-up hardware as a pmic platform device is not a bad idea, we would then need to have a generic mmc-host pmic property, which would be used both to do the initial powerup before scanning, as well as for the sdio device driver to get a handle to the pmic, for run time power-management (if desired).quoted
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I don't know if this will ever apply to SDIO but with other buses the complicated bits come when the driver wants to take over some of the power management do things like turn some of the supplies or clocks on and off independently at runtime for low power modes.quoted
Hmm, good point in that case actually having these things in the child node makes most sense, because then the driver can find them their. Note that the mmc core enabling things does not mean that the driver cannot later disable them if needed.Right, that's good idea for solving the problem - the child device can either share the reference with the bus or have some way of getting at the object the bus requested depending on what's sensible. Only potentia complication I can think of with that approach is a device with multiple bus interfaces (I'm mainly thinking of SDIO vs SPI) but it doesn't seem to hard to deal with that in the bus adaption layers of the drivers.
I don't think there is a need to share references, ie for clks multiple drivers can hold a reference and they can be enabled / disabled multiple times, only when the last enable is countered by a disable the clock will really be disabled, iow this should all just work. Anyways these are all implementation details lets focus on the bindings bit first. Regards, Hans