On 10/03/14 15:52, Laurent Pinchart wrote:

In theory unidirectional links in DT are indeed enough. However, let's not 
forget the following.

- There's no such thing as single start points for graphs. Sure, in some 
simple cases the graph will have a single start point, but that's not a 
generic rule. For instance the camera graphs 
http://ideasonboard.org/media/omap3isp.ps and 
http://ideasonboard.org/media/eyecam.ps have two camera sensors, and thus two 
starting points from a data flow point of view. And if you want a better 
understanding of how complex media graphs can become, have a look at 
http://ideasonboard.org/media/vsp1.0.pdf (that's a real world example, albeit 
all connections are internal to the SoC in that particular case, and don't 
need to be described in DT).

- There's also no such thing as a master device that can just point to slave 
devices. Once again simple cases exist where that model could work, but real 
world examples exist of complex pipelines with dozens of elements all 
implemented by a separate IP core and handled by separate drivers, forming a 
graph with long chains and branches. We thus need real graph bindings.

- Finally, having no backlinks in DT would make the software implementation 
very complex. We need to be able to walk the graph in a generic way without 
having any of the IP core drivers loaded, and without any specific starting 
point. We would thus need to parse the complete DT tree, looking at all nodes 
and trying to find out whether they're part of the graph we're trying to walk. 
The complexity of the operation would be at best quadratic to the number of 
nodes in the whole DT and to the number of nodes in the graph.

I did use plural when I said "to give the start points...".

If you have a list of starting points in the DT, a "graph helper" or
something could create a runtime representation of the graph at some
early phase during the boot, which would include backlinks. The
individual drivers could use that runtime graph, instead of the DT graph.

But it still sounds considerably more complex than double-links in DT.

 Tomi