On 13-12-17, 10:42, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:

On Sun, Oct 29, 2017 at 07:18:51PM +0530, Viresh Kumar wrote:

quoted

Some devices are powered ON by the bootloader before the bootloader
handovers control to Linux. It maybe important for those devices to keep
working until the time a Linux device driver probes the device and
reconfigure its resources.

A typical example of that can be the LCD controller, which is used by
the bootloaders to show image(s) while the platform is booting into
Linux. The LCD controller can be using some resources, like clk,
regulators, PM domain, etc, that are shared between several devices.
These shared resources should be configured to satisfy need of all the
users. If another device's (X) driver gets probed before the LCD
controller driver in this case, then it may end up reconfiguring these
resources to ranges satisfying the current users (only device X) and
that can make the LCD screen unstable.

This patch introduces the concept of boot-constraints, which will be set
by the bootloaders and the kernel will satisfy them until the time
driver for such a device is probed (successfully or unsuccessfully).

The list of boot constraint types is empty for now, and will be
incrementally updated by later patches.

Only two routines are exposed by the boot constraints core for now:

I think we need some documentation somewhere on how to use this, right?

Will add that in next version.

-- 
viresh