Add Allwinner Q8 tablets hardware manager

Hi Hans,

On Oct 26, 2016, at 14:46 , Hans de Goede [off-list ref] wrote:

Hi,

On 24-10-16 19:39, Mark Rutland wrote:

quoted

On Fri, Oct 14, 2016 at 09:53:31AM +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:

quoted

Hi Rob, Mark, et al.,

Hi Hans,

Apologies for the delay in replying to this.

No worries, I believe that 1 week is actually a pretty good
turn around time, esp. directly after a conference.

Conferences are a deadline killer. Just got around taking a look.

quoted

I'd like to be clear that I do understand that there is a problem that
needs to be addressed here. However, I do not believe that the *current*
in-kernel approach is correct. More on that below.

Ok.

quoted

quoted

Mark, I know that we discussed this at ELCE and you clearly indicated
that according to you this does not belong in the kernel. I was a bit
surprised by this part of the discussion.

I had posted a RFC earlier and Rob had indicated that given that the q8
tablets are a special case, as my code uses actual probing rather then some
pre-arranged id mechanism with say an eeprom, that doing this in a
non-generic manner would be ok for my special case.

To some extent, Rob and I may have differing views here; I'm not
entirely sure what Rob's view is, and I cannot talk on his behalf. I
certainly must apologise for having not commented on said RFC, however.

quoted

So on to why I believe that the kernel is the best place to do this, at least
for my special use-case:

1. Configurability

Since the q8 tablets do not have any id mechanism I'm probing i2c busses to
generate i2c client dt nodes with the right address and compatible.
Some info in these nodes (e.g. touchscreen firmware-name) is not probable at
all and gets set by heuristics. This heuristics may get things wrong.
So my current implementation offers kernel cmdline options to override this.

As I mentioned at ELCE, one major concern I have with this approach is
this probing, which in part relies on a collection of heuristics.

This is quite use-case specific, anyways, the probing is a 2 step process:

1) Identify which hardware there is in the tablet, this is pretty
reliable, we only detect a fix set of known possible touchscreens
and accelerometers, at known addresses and almost all have an id
register to check.

2) Determine *defaults* for various none probable settings, like guessing
which firmware to load into the touchscreen controllers, as there are
at least 2 ways the gsl1680 is wired up on these tablets and this
requires 2 different firmware files. This uses heuristics, to, as said,
determine the defaults all of the non-probable bits are overidable
through config options (currently kernel module options). Getting these
wrong is not dangerous to the hardware, but will work in a non-functional
or misbehaving (wrong coordinates) touchscreen.

Note with the models I've access to so far the heuristics score 100%
but I'm not sure how representative the 16 models I've access to are
(they are all different and have been bought over a span of multiple
years).

quoted

I'm worried that this is very fragile, and sets us up for having to
maintain a much larger collection of heuristics and/or a database of
particular boards in future. This is fragile, defeats much of the gain
from DT.

I understand your worries, as said I'm confident the actual probing
is safe and getting the heuristics wrong will result in misbehavior,
but not in any hardware damage or such.

quoted

Worse, this could be completely incompatible with some arbitrary board
that comes by in future,

I assume you mean an arbitrary q8 tablet here, as the probe code does
bind by board/machine compatible, so for a really arbitrary board
this code will never activate.

quoted

because the kernel assumed something that was
not true, which it would not have done if things were explicitly
described to the kernel.

I understand your worry, but moving the probing code to say u-boot
will not change any of this, the kernel will get the explicit
description created by the u-boot probe code, but it would be
just as wrong.

So maybe we need to answer 2 questions in a row:

1) Do we want such probe code at all ?

My answer to this is yes, these (cheap) tablets are interesting to
e.g. the maker community and I would like them to run mainline
(and run mainline well), but given the way there are put together
this require some code to dynamically adapt to the batch of the
month somewhere

2) Where do we put this code ?

If we agree on 1 (I assume we do) then this becomes the real
question, at which point your worries about the kernel assuming
something which is not true because the probe code got it wrong
may become true regardless where the code lives.

So wrt this worries is all I can do is ask you to trust me to
not mess things up, just like we all trust driver authors, etc.
all the time to not mess things up.

quoted

As I mentioned at ELCE, I'm not opposed to the concept of the kernel
applying overlays or fixups based on a well-defined set of criteria;
having some of that embedded in the DT itself would be remarkably
helpful.  However, I am very much not keen on loosely defined criteria as
with here, as it couples the DT and kernel, and creates problems longer
term, as described above.

Right, so again I think we need to split the discussion in 2 steps:

1) How do we apply the fixups, currently I'm using free-form changes
done from C-code. I can envision moving to something like the quirk
mechanism suggested by Pantelis in the past. Note this is not a perfect
fit for my rather corner-case use-case, but I can understand that in
general you want the variants to be described in dt, and activated
in some way, rather then have c-code make free-form changes to the dt

We?ve had this discussion before, so I guess here it goes again.

I think the biggest objection is the programmatic way of applying
every quirk by ?hand?.

If there was a way to keep the probing mechanism but just spit out
a ?model? number we could reasonably map it to an overlay to apply
with a generic overlay manager.

From an internal s/w standpoint having an expansion board or soldered

parts makes no difference. 

2) How do we select which fixups to apply. Again I can understand
you wanting some well defined mechanism for this, but again my
use-case is special and simply does not allow for this as there
is no id-eeprom to read or some such.

Yes there is no EEPROM but you might be able to map probing results to
a fake ?model? number.

Let me expand a bit:

Assume that you have a number of probing steps, for example A, B, C each
returning true or false, and C being executed only when B is ?true? you
could do this to generate a bit field that identifies it.

For example let?s assume that model FOO?s probing steps are

A false, B true, C false -> 010

Model?s BAR

A true, B false, C don?t care -> 10x

Mapping these to models could be

Model FOO, (010 & 111) == 010 (all three probing steps must match)

Model BAR, (10x & 110) = 100 (the first two probing steps must match)

quoted

quoted

Although having to specify kernel cmdline options is not the plug and play
experience I want to give end-users most distros do have documentation on
how to do this and doing this is relatively easy for end-users. Moving this
to the bootloader means moving to some bootloader specific config mechanism
which is going to be quite hard (and possibly dangerous) for users to use.

I have to ask, why is it more dangerous?

Because for normal end users meddling with the bootloader / with u-boot's
environment is like flashing a PC BIOS. Most (non technical) end users will
want to install u-boot once (or not at all) and then just have it work.

Users do *not* want to deal with the bootloader. They don?t even want to
know that it?s there. As far they're concerned if you need to drop in
the bootloader to do something -> broken.
 

quoted

Perhaps more difficult, but that can be solved,

More difficult means not doable for many users.

+1

quoted

if the manual
corrections are simply a set of options to be passed to the kernel, I
don't see why the bootloader cannot pick this up.

quoted

2. Upgradability

Most users treat the bootloader like they treat an x86 machine BIOS/EFI,
they will never upgrade it unless they really have to. This means that it
will be very difficult to get users to actual benefit from bug-fixes /
improvements done to the probing code. Where as the kernel on boards running
e.g. Debian or Fedora gets regular updates together with the rest of the
system.

Given that DTBs are supposed to remain supported, users should find
themselves with a system that continues to work, but may not have all
the bells and whistles it could, much like elsewhere.

While it's true that we have issues in this area, I don't think that's
an argument for putting things into the kernel for this specific set of
boards.

It is an argument to put much of the dynamic (dt) hardware support in
the kernel in general.

quoted

quoted

3. Infrastructure

The kernel simply has better infrastructure for doing these kind of things.

At least on the DT front, a lot of work has gone into improving the
infrastructure, e.g. the work that Free Electrons have done [1]. I
appreciate that the infrastructure for things like poking SPI may not be
as advanced.

Which bits of infrastructure do you find lacking today?

Nothing really specific (I've not yet tried porting the probe code
to u-boot), but I just find working within the kernel easier in general,
since there really just is a lot more infrastructure. Note I'm the
upstream u-boot maintainer for the allwinner SoC support, so this
is not due to me being unfamiliar with u-boot.

quoted

quoted

Yes we could improve the bootloader, but the kernel is also improving
and likely at a faster rate. Besides that the purpose of the
bootloader is mostly to be simple and small, load the kernel and get
out of the way, not to be a general purpose os kernel. So it will
simply always have less infrastructure and that is a good thing,
otherwise we will be writing another general purpose os which is a
waste of effort.

I think this conflates a number of details. Yes, we'd like firmware and
bootloaders to be small, and yes, their infrastructure and feature
support will be smaller than a general purpose OS.

That doesn't imply that they cannot have features necessary to boostrap
an OS.

It's also not strictly necessary that the firmware or bootloader have
the capability to do all this probing, as that could be contained in
another part (e.g. a U-Boot application which is run once to detect the
board details, logging this into a file).

It's also possible to ship an intermediary stage (e.g. like the
impedance matcher) which can be upgradeable independently of the kernel.

Yes there are other solutions, but they all involve a lot more
moving pieces (and thus will break) then a single isolated .c file
in the kernel, which is all this series adds.

Esp the intermediate solution just adds a ton of complexity with 0
gain.

Simple is the way to go. Putting things in the kernel is the simplest
solution for the users, for the distro maintainers and the board support
people.

quoted

quoted

4. This is not a new board file

Mark, at ELCE I got the feeling that your biggest worry / objection is
that this will bring back board files, but that is not the case, if you
look at the actual code it is nothing like a board-file at all. Where a
board file was instantiating device after device after device from c-code,
with maybe a few if-s in there to deal with board revisions. This code is
all about figuring out which accelerometer and touchscreen there are,
to then add nodes to the dt for this 2 devices, almost all the code is
probing, the actual dt modifying code is tiny and no direct device
instantiation is done at all.

Sorry, but I must disagree. This code:

(a) identifies a set of boards based on a top-level compatible string.
   i.e. it's sole purpose is to handle those boards.

(b) assumes non-general properties of those boards (e.g. that poking
   certain SPI endpoints is safe).

(c) applies arbitrary properties to the DT, applying in-built knowledge
   of those boards (in addition to deep structural knowledge of the
   DTB in question).

To me, given the implicit knowledge, that qualifies as a "board file".

As I mentioned at ELCE, if this had no knowledge of the boards in
question, I would be less concerned. e.g. if there was a well-defined
identification mechanism, describe in the DT, with fixups also defined
in the DT.

And as I tried to explain before, for this specific use-case describing
all this board specific knowledge in a generic manner in dt is simply
impossible, unless we add a turing complete language to dt aka aml.

I've a feeling that you're mixing this, rather special, use-case with
the more generic use-case of daughter-boards for various small-board-computers
I agree that for the SBC use-case it makes sense to try and come up with
a shared core / dt bindings for much of this. Note that even this boards
will still need a board (or board-family) specific method for getting
the actual id from a daughter-board, but this board specific code could
then pass the id to some more general hw-manager core which starts applying
dt changes based on the id. But this assumes there is a single id to
uniquely identify the extensions, which in my case there simply is not.

^ read above.

quoted

quoted

5. This is an exception, not the rule

Yes this is introducing board (family of boards) specific c-code into the
kernel, so in a way it is reminiscent of board files. But sometimes this is
necessary, just look at all the vendor / platform specific code in the kernel
in drivers/platform/x86, or all the places where DMI strings are used to
uniquely identify a x86 board and adjust behavior.

But this really is the exception, not the rule. I've written/upstreamed a
number of drivers for q8 tablets hardware and if you look at e.g. the
silead touchscreen driver then in linux-next this is already used for 5
ARM dts files where no board specific C-code is involved at all.

So this again is very different from the board file era, where C-code
had to be used to fill device specific platform-data structs, here all
necessary info is contained in the dt-binding and there are many users
who do not need any board specific C-code in the kernel at all.

So dt is working as it should and is avoiding board specific C-code for
the majority of the cases. But sometimes hardware is not as we ideally
would like it to be; and for those *exceptions* we are sometimes going
to need C-code in the kernel, just like there is "board" specific C-code
in the x86 code.

Your talk convinced me that we're both going to see more variation
within this family of boards, and that we'll see more families of boards
following a similar patter. Given that, I think that we need a more
general solution, as I commented on the RFC.

That doesn't necessarily mean that this can't happen in the kernel, but
it certainly needs to be more strictly defined, e.g. with match criteria
and fixups explicit in the DTB.

The only answer I've to: "with match criteria and fixups explicit in the DTB"
is: ok, give my a turing complete language inside DTB then, anything else
will not suffice. So either we are doomed to reinvent ACPI; or we must
accept some board(family) specific C-code in the kernel.

Please don?t let DT stagnate. We don?t have to repeat mistakes and we don?t
have to remain true to the spirit of what DT was supposed to be more than
a decade ago.

The problems we deal now are different, the industry is different and the
users are different.

We have to evolve along with them.

Regards,

Hans

Regards

? Pantelis