[PATCH 46/58] clocksource/drivers: Add a new driver for the Atmel ARM TC blocks

On 07/06/2017 at 16:17:35 +0200, Daniel Lezcano wrote:

quoted

quoted

quoted

This driver uses regmap and syscon to be able to probe early in the boot
and avoid having to switch on the TCB clocksource later. Using regmap also
means that unused TCB channels may be used by other drivers (PWM for
example).

Can you give more details, I fail to understand how regmap and syscon help to
probe sooner than timer_init()?

Because before that, the tcb driver relied on atmel_tclib to share the
TCBs and it happened way too late, at arch_initcall() time.

So is it still necesary to use regmap? I would like to take the opportunity to
move the init routine to the common init routine if possible:

	https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/9768845/

It is still necessary because we want to be able to share the timer
between multiple drivers. For example, you can have the clocksource on
channel 0, clockevent on channel 1 and a pwm on channel 2

quoted

quoted

Can you explain why we have two clocks here?

Each channel have its clock, I can add a comment if you want.

I don't understand. Why do we have two clocks?

One channel is driven by one clock and the second one takes the overflow signal
from the first one, so no second clock is involved there, no?

Those are the peripheral clocks, they are not used by the counters but
used to be able to read/write the registers.

-- 
Alexandre Belloni, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
http://free-electrons.com