Re: [PATCH 00/21] On-demand device registration

On 2 June 2015 at 10:48, Linus Walleij [off-list ref] wrote:

On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 4:53 PM, Tomeu Vizoso
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

have looked into ordered probing as a
better way of solving this than moving nodes around in the DT or playing with
initcall levels.

While reading the thread [1] that Alexander Holler started with his series to
make probing order deterministic, it occurred to me that it should be possible
to achieve the same by registering devices as they are referenced by other
devices.

This is pretty cool, but a too local solution to a global problem.

Deferred probe and initcall reordering, silly as they may seem,
does not require you to use device tree.

The real solution, which I think I pointed out already when we
added deferred probe, is to put dependency graphs in the drivers

By this you mean something like what Thierry suggested here?

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1774623

and have the kernel device driver core percolate dependecies by
walking the graph on probing driver, removing driver (usually the
inverse use case), [runtime] suspend and [runtime] resumeing
a driver. Possibly the dependencies will even be different
depending on use case.

This is what systemd is doing in userspace for starting services:
ask for your dependencies and wait for them if they are not
there. So drivers ask for resources and wait for them. It also
needs to be abstract, so for example we need to be able to
hang on regulator_get() until the driver is up and providing that
regulator, and as long as everything is in slowpath it should
be OK. (And vice versa mutatis mutandis for clk, gpio, pin
control, interrupts (!) and DMA channels for example.)

I understood above that you propose probing devices in order, but now
you mention that resource getters would block until the dependency is
fulfilled which confuses me because if we are probing in order then
all dependencies would be fulfilled before the device in question gets
probed.

So if this should be solved it should be solved in an abstract way
in the device driver core available for all, then have calls calling
out to DT, ACPI, possibly even PCI or USB (as these
enumerate devices themselves) to obtain a certain
dependency.

Yeah, I was planning looking into this now that I got it working with
async probing.

Thanks,

Tomeu

Yours,
Linus Walleij
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