On Mon, Jan 04, 2021 at 07:38:21PM +0100, Krzysztof Kozlowski wrote:

On Mon, Jan 04, 2021 at 06:27:34PM +0000, Mark Brown wrote:

quoted

We can indicate the presence of features without adding new compatible
strings, that's just encoding the way Linux currently divides things up
into the bindings.  For example having an extcon property seems like it
should be enough to figure out if we're using extcon.

It won't be enough because MFD will create device for extcon and bind
the driver. The same for the charger. We have a board where max8997 is
used only as PMIC (providing regulators) without battery and USB
connectivity.

I'm not sure I follow, sorry?  Either the core driver can parse the
bindings enough to know what children it has or (probably better) it can
instantiate the children unconditionally and then the function drivers
can figure out if they need to do anything.

Another point, is that this reflects the real hardware. The same as we
model entire SoC as multiple children of soc node (with their own
properties), here we represent smaller chip which also has
sub-components.

Components we're calling things like "extcon"...