Thread (15 messages) 15 messages, 6 authors, 2017-12-19

Re: [PATCH 1/3] dt-bindings: chosen: Add clocksource and clockevent selection

From: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
Date: 2017-12-15 11:32:53
Also in: linux-arm-kernel, lkml

Hi,

On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 07:53:11PM +0100, Alexandre Belloni wrote:
The clocksource and clockevent timer are probed early in the boot process.
At that time it is difficult for linux to know whether a particular timer
can be used as the clocksource or the clockevent or by another driver,
especially when they are all identical or have similar features.
I think that to solve this problem, we need to stop treating
clocksources and clockevent devices as completely separate device types,
and instead treat them as particular cases of a more general clock
device.

That way, a driver can register a single device, with flags saying
whether it is:

* a clocksource only
* a clockevent device only
* both a clocksource and clockevent device
* both, but mutually exclusive at runtime

... and thus drivers don't have to make an impossible decision up-front
as to how the device should be used.

As more devices get registered, the core timekeeping code can improve on
its choices and re-assign devices.

That doesn't solve the case where a clock device may use resources we
want for something else, but I think we can solve that separately.

Thanks,
Mark.
quoted hunk ↗ jump to hunk
Until now, multiple strategies have been used to solve that:
 - use Kconfig option as MXC_USE_EPIT or ATMEL_TCB_CLKSRC_BLOCK
 - use a kernel parameter as the "clocksource" early_param in mach-omap2
 - registering the first seen timer as a clockevent and the second one as
 a clocksource as in rk_timer_init or dw_apb_timer_init

Add a linux,clocksource and a linux,clockevent node in chosen with a timer
property pointing to the timer to use. Other properties, like the targeted
precision may be added later.

Signed-off-by: Alexandre Belloni <redacted>
---
 Documentation/devicetree/bindings/chosen.txt | 20 ++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 20 insertions(+)
diff --git a/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/chosen.txt b/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/chosen.txt
index e3b13ea7d2ae..c7ee3ecb5276 100644
--- a/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/chosen.txt
+++ b/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/chosen.txt
@@ -120,3 +120,23 @@ e.g.
 While this property does not represent a real hardware, the address
 and the size are expressed in #address-cells and #size-cells,
 respectively, of the root node.
+
+linux,clocksource and linux,clockevent
+--------------------------------------
+
+Those nodes have a timer property. This property is a phandle to the timer to be
+chosen as the clocksource or clockevent. This is only useful when the platform
+has multiple identical timers and it is not possible to let linux make the
+correct choice.
+
+/ {
+	chosen {
+		linux,clocksource {
+			timer = <&timer0>;
+		};
+
+		linux,clockevent {
+			timer = <&timer1>;
+		};
+	};
+};
-- 
2.15.1

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