Thread (74 messages) 74 messages, 16 authors, 2015-04-22

[PATCH 0/3] clk: divider: three exactness fixes (and a rant)

From: Mike Turquette <hidden>
Date: 2015-03-09 21:07:42
Also in: lkml

Quoting Stephen Boyd (2015-03-09 12:05:34)
On 03/09/15 02:58, Philipp Zabel wrote:
quoted
Am Freitag, den 06.03.2015, 11:40 -0800 schrieb Stephen Boyd:
quoted
On 03/06/15 11:28, Uwe Kleine-K?nig wrote:
quoted
Hello Mike,

On Fri, Mar 06, 2015 at 10:57:30AM -0800, Mike Turquette wrote:
quoted
Quoting Uwe Kleine-K?nig (2015-02-21 02:40:22)
quoted
Hello,

TLDR: only apply patch 1 and rip of CLK_DIVIDER_ROUND_CLOSEST.

I stared at clk-divider.c for some time now given Sascha's failing test
case. I found a fix for the failure (which happens to be what Sascha
suspected).

The other two patches fix problems only present when handling dividers
that have CLK_DIVIDER_ROUND_CLOSEST set. Note that these are still
heavily broken however. So having a 4bit-divider and a parent clk of
10000 (as in Sascha's test case) requesting

        clk_set_rate(clk, 666)

sets the rate to 625 (div=15) instead of 667 (div=16). The reason is the
choice of parent_rate in clk_divider_bestdiv's loop is wrong for
CLK_DIVIDER_ROUND_CLOSEST (with and without patch 1). A fix here is
non-trivial and for sure more than one rate must be tested here. This is
complicated by the fact that clk_round_rate might return a value bigger
than the requested rate which convinces me (once more) that it's a bad
idea to allow that. Even if this was fixed for .round_rate,
clk_divider_set_rate is still broken because it also uses

        div = DIV_ROUND_UP(parent_rate, rate);

to calculate the (pretended) best divider to get near rate.

Note this makes at least two reasons to remove support for
CLK_DIVIDER_ROUND_CLOSEST!

Instead I'd favour creating a function

        clk_round_rate_nearest

as was suggested some time ago by Soren Brinkmann and me[1] that doesn't
Uwe,

Thanks for the fixes. I'm thinking of taking all three for 4.0. I also
agree on clk_round_rate_nearest (along with a _ceil and _floor version
as well). That's something we can do for 4.1 probably.
I'd say that we make round_rate the _floor version. I guess in most
cases that already does the right thing. Also I think 4.1 is very
ambitious, so my suggestion for 4.1 is:

 - add a WARN_ON_ONCE to clk_round_rate catching calls that return a
   value bigger than requested.
 - implement clk_round_rate_nearest using clk_round_rate and the
   assumption that it returns a value that is <= the requested rate.
   I think without that there are too many special cases to handle and
   probably not even a reliable way to determine the nearest rate.
 - while we're at it tightening the requirements for clk_round_rate
   let's also specify the expected rounding. I'd vote for the
   mathematical rounding, that is

    clk_round_rate(someclk, 333)

   explicitly is allowed to return a rate bigger than 333 as long as it
   is less than 333.5.

At one point while developing patch 1 I had the dividers fixed for the
rounding issue. I think I still have that patch somewhere so can post it
as RFC.
Why do we need clk_round_rate_nearest? We have rate constraints now so
drivers should be moving towards requesting a rate that's within a
tolerance they can accept if they even care to enforce anything like
that. Eventually clk_round_rate() returning a value smaller or larger
than what it's called with won't matter as long as what the
implementation does fits within the constraints that consumers specify.
It may even be possible to remove clk_round_rate() as a consumer API.
If I have to provide a panel pixel clock I usually want to get a rate as
close as possible to the specified typical rate, but within the
specified limits.

Assume a panel with 70 MHz ideal pixel clock and a valid range of 60 MHz
to 80 MHz. If the clock supply supports two frequencies within that
range, 60 MHz and 72 MHz, I'd prefer 72 MHz to be chosen over 60 Mhz.
Hm.. Maybe we should tweak the arguments to clk_set_range() to have a
"typical" rate? So instead of the current API:

  int clk_set_rate_range(struct clk *clk, unsigned long min, unsigned
long max)

we should have

 int clk_set_rate_range(struct clk *clk, unsigned long min, unsigned
long typical, unsigned long max)

with the semantics that we'll set the rate within the min,max
constraints and try to get the rate as close to the typical rate as
possible? That would match quite a few datasheets out there that specify
these triplets.
This suffers from the same problem that round_rate has today, which is
the question of rounding policy. When you say that we want to get as
close as possible, how do we decide between equivalent values? We need
to make a default policy, document it and stick to it. E.g:

clk_set_rate_range(clk, 100, 110, 120);

Let's say that round_rate gives us possible values of 108 and 112, both
of which are two Hz away from the typical value of 110Hz. One is not
closer than the other. Which do we choose? Let's figure out a sane
default to the question and document it very loudly in the code.

For the sake of consistency I think we should choose the slower value
since this is what a normal clk_round_rate should do stay within spec.
Obviously either rate (108 or 112) would be in spec, since they are
within the min/max range. But if a normal call to clk_round_rate should
choose a ceiling value by default (which I think it should) then
probably the range stuff should as well, just to keep us from confusing
ourselves.

Regards,
Mike
-- 
Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. is a member of Code Aurora Forum,
a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project
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