On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 3:04 AM, Stephen Boyd [off-list ref] wrote:

On 10/06/2014 10:28 PM, Guenter Roeck wrote:

quoted

Various drivers implement architecture and/or device specific means to
remove power from the system.  For the most part, those drivers set the
global variable pm_power_off to point to a function within the driver.

This mechanism has a number of drawbacks.  Typically only one scheme
to remove power is supported (at least if pm_power_off is used).
At least in theory there can be multiple means remove power, some of
which may be less desirable. For example, some mechanisms may only
power off the CPU or the CPU card, while another may power off the
entire system.  Others may really just execute a restart sequence
or drop into the ROM monitor. Using pm_power_off can also be racy
if the function pointer is set from a driver built as module, as the
driver may be in the process of being unloaded when pm_power_off is
called. If there are multiple poweroff handlers in the system, removing
a module with such a handler may inadvertently reset the pointer to
pm_power_off to NULL, leaving the system with no means to remove power.

Introduce a system poweroff handler call chain to solve the described
problems.  This call chain is expected to be executed from the
architecture specific machine_power_off() function.  Drivers providing
system poweroff functionality are expected to register with this call chain.
By using the priority field in the notifier block, callers can control
poweroff handler execution sequence and thus ensure that the poweroff
handler with the optimal capabilities to remove power for a given system
is called first.

What happened to this series? I want to add shutdown support to my
platform and I need to write a register on the PMIC in one driver to
configure it for shutdown instead of restart and then write an MMIO
register to tell the PMIC to actually do the shutdown in another driver.
It seems that the notifier solves this case for me, albeit with the
slight complication that I need to order the two with some priority.

I was wondering the same thing. I did find out that things kind of
stalled after Linus cast doubt on the chosen path [1]. I'm not sure
there's any consensus on what would be best to do instead.

Frans

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/11/6/641