On-demand device probing

Hello,

I have a problem with the panel on my Tegra Chromebook taking longer
than expected to be ready during boot (Stéphane Marchesin reported what
is basically the same issue in [0]), and have looked into ordered
probing as a better way of solving this than moving nodes around in the
DT or playing with initcall levels and linking order.

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 probing devices as they are
referenced by other devices.

This basically reuses the information that is already implicit in the
probe() implementations, saving us from refactoring existing drivers or
adding information to DTBs.

During review of v1 of this series Linus Walleij suggested that it
should be the device driver core to make sure that dependencies are
ready before probing a device. I gave this idea a try [2] but Mark Brown
pointed out to the logic duplication between the resource acquisition
and dependency discovery code paths (though I think it's fairly minor).

To address that code duplication I experimented with Arnd's devm_probe
[3] concept of having drivers declare their dependencies instead of
acquiring them during probe, and while it worked [4], I don't think we
end up winning anything when compared to just probing devices on-demand
from resource getters.

One remaining objection is to the "sprinkling" of calls to
fwnode_ensure_device() in the resource getters of each subsystem, but I
think it's the right thing to do given that the storage of resources is
currently subsystem-specific.

We could avoid the above by moving resource storage into the core, but I
don't think there's a compelling case for that.

I have tested this on boards with Tegra, iMX.6, Exynos and OMAP SoCs,
and these patches were enough to eliminate all the deferred probes
(except one in PandaBoard because omap_dma_system doesn't have a

79 more lines

When looking up a backlight device through its firmware node, probe it
if it hasn't already.

The goal is to reduce deferred probes to a minimum, as it makes it very
cumbersome to find out why a device failed to probe, and can introduce
very big delays in when a critical device is probed.

Signed-off-by: Tomeu Vizoso <redacted>
---

Changes in v2: None

 drivers/video/backlight/backlight.c | 2 ++
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)

diff --git a/drivers/video/backlight/backlight.c b/drivers/video/backlight/backlight.c
index bddc8b17a4d8..f7151d916435 100644
--- a/drivers/video/backlight/backlight.c
+++ b/drivers/video/backlight/backlight.c

@@ -559,6 +559,8 @@ struct backlight_device *of_find_backlight_by_node(struct device_node *node)
 {
 	struct device *dev;
 
+	fwnode_ensure_device(&node->fwnode);
+
 	dev = class_find_device(backlight_class, NULL, node, of_parent_match);
 
 	return dev ? to_backlight_device(dev) : NULL;

-- 
2.4.3

On Tuesday, July 28, 2015 03:19:31 PM Tomeu Vizoso wrote:

Hello,

I have a problem with the panel on my Tegra Chromebook taking longer
than expected to be ready during boot (Stéphane Marchesin reported what
is basically the same issue in [0]), and have looked into ordered
probing as a better way of solving this than moving nodes around in the
DT or playing with initcall levels and linking order.

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 probing devices as they are
referenced by other devices.

This basically reuses the information that is already implicit in the
probe() implementations, saving us from refactoring existing drivers or
adding information to DTBs.

During review of v1 of this series Linus Walleij suggested that it
should be the device driver core to make sure that dependencies are
ready before probing a device. I gave this idea a try [2] but Mark Brown
pointed out to the logic duplication between the resource acquisition
and dependency discovery code paths (though I think it's fairly minor).

To address that code duplication I experimented with Arnd's devm_probe
[3] concept of having drivers declare their dependencies instead of
acquiring them during probe, and while it worked [4], I don't think we
end up winning anything when compared to just probing devices on-demand
from resource getters.

One remaining objection is to the "sprinkling" of calls to
fwnode_ensure_device() in the resource getters of each subsystem, but I
think it's the right thing to do given that the storage of resources is
currently subsystem-specific.

We could avoid the above by moving resource storage into the core, but I
don't think there's a compelling case for that.

I have tested this on boards with Tegra, iMX.6, Exynos and OMAP SoCs,
and these patches were enough to eliminate all the deferred probes
(except one in PandaBoard because omap_dma_system doesn't have a

4 more quoted lines

Can you trim your CC list somewhat, please?

I'm definitely going to look at this, but not before then next week.
Sorry about that.

Thanks,
Rafael