[PATCH RFC] mfd: syscon: Decouple syscon interface from syscon devices
From: arnd@arndb.de (Arnd Bergmann)
Date: 2014-06-17 15:42:59
Also in:
linux-samsung-soc, lkml
On Tuesday 17 June 2014 17:32:44 Tomasz Figa wrote:
Currently a syscon entity can be only registered directly through a platform device that binds to a dedicated driver. However in certain use cases it is desirable to make a device used with another driver a syscon interface provider. For example, certain SoCs (e.g. Exynos) contain system controller blocks which perform various functions such as power domain control, CPU power management, low power mode control, but in addition contain certain IP integration glue, such as various signal masks, coprocessor power control, etc. In such case, there is a need to have a dedicated driver for such system controller but also share registers with other drivers. The latter is where the syscon interface is helpful. This patch decouples syscon object from syscon driver, so that it can be registered from any driver in addition to the original "syscon" platform driver. Signed-off-by: Tomasz Figa <redacted>
Hi Tomasz, This seems like a reasonable way of solving the problem, but I think there is an even better one that we have about in the past: if we promote syscon from a platform driver into a a drivers/base/ helper that is independent of the platform device matching, we can use call syscon_regmap_lookup_* for any device node, whether it's already bound to a driver or not, which do what you need. It would also make it easier to call the syscon code before the platform_device infrastructure gets initialized, which is something a number of people have asked for, e.g. for using regmap to do SMP bringup or for clock registration. Arnd