On 18 October 2015 at 21:53, Mark Brown <broonie@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Sun, Oct 18, 2015 at 12:37:57PM -0700, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote: >> On Sun, Oct 18, 2015 at 08:29:31PM +0100, Mark Brown wrote: >> > On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 11:57:50PM -0700, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote: > >> > > I can't see adding calls like this all over the tree just to solve a >> > > bus-specific problem, you are adding of_* calls where they aren't >> > > needed, or wanted, at all. > >> > This isn't bus specific, I'm not sure what makes you say that? > >> You are making it bus-specific by putting these calls all over the tree >> in different bus subsystems semi-randomly for all I can determine. > > Do you mean firmware rather than bus here? I think that's the confusion > I have... Hi all, hope you don't mind I summarize the points taken instead of replying to the individual emails. I tried to address all the concerns that have been raised again in the cover letter, but I guess I did a bad job at explaining myself, so here's another (more in-depth) go at it. 1) About the sprinkling of calls, everybody agreed it's a bad smell from the start, but the intention is to modify the behaviour of the already-DT-specific part of each subsystem without duplicating code. A way to avoid the sprinkling would be to move the storage and lookup of resources to the core (using classes and their list of devices to replace the likes of __of_usb_find_phy). I also like Mark's idea of calling of_device_probe from of_parse_phandle, which would be much less invasive but I'm not sure if it would be right to call that function in all the current cases in which of_parse_phandle is called. 2) About the goal of the series, what matters to my employer is that once a device defers its probe it's only going to be reprobed in late_initcall, after all the devices have been tentatively probed once. In the practice this means that devices get probed in a dependency order in which first go devices without dependencies then go up the tree until the leave devices (which tend to be the ones with effects visible to the user). This series changes to another dependency order in which when a leaf node gets probed, it recursively "pulls" its dependencies. This way we stop massively delaying the probing of the display devices and vendors can stop carrying sizeable hacks in their trees which just further reduce the incentive to upstream. The above is what funds this work, but in my personal opinion the biggest advantage of this work is that it makes development on embedded platforms more efficient because right now we don't have a way of telling if a device deferred its probe because of an ordering issue, or because there's a problem. If a device is available and has a compatible driver, but it cannot be probed because a dependency isn't going to be available, that's an error and is going to cause real-world problems unless the device is redundant. Currently we say nothing because with deferred probe the probe callbacks are also part of the mechanism that determines the dependency order. I have wasted countless hours hunting for the reason why a device didn't probe and I have heard the same several times from others. Having a specific switch for enabling deferred probe logging sounds good, but there's going to be hundreds of spurious messages about deferred probes that were just deferrals and only one of them is going to be the actual error in which a device failed to find a dependency. 3) Regarding total boot time, I don't expect this series to make much of a difference because though we would save a lot of matching and querying for resources, that's little time compared with how long we wait for hardware to react during probing. Async probing is more likely to help with drivers that take a long time to probe. 4) About the breakage we have seen, that's not caused so far by probing devices on-demand but by delaying probes until all built-in drivers have been registered. The latter isn't strictly needed for on-demand probing but without it most of the benefits are lost because probes of dependencies are going to be deferred because the drivers aren't there yet. We could avoid that by registering drivers also on-demand but we would need to make the matching information available beforehand, which is a massive change in itself. This should speed up boot some, and also cause leaf devices to be up earlier. One more thing about the breakage we have seen so far is that it's generally caused by implicit dependencies and hunting those is probably the second biggest timesink of the linux embedded developer after failed probes. We depend on hacks such as link order, node order in the DT, initcall gerrymandering and a blind hope in things that started some time ago to have finished by now. And those implicit dependencies are often left completely undocumented. This is really fragile and breaks often when changing something unrelated such as when adding another revision of a board or soc and a dependency starts deferring its probe or is delayed because of something else. Also breaks with async probing. Delayed probes can be reverted by disabling a Kconfig, so we can fix those issues in an ordered manner as time allows (we could disable it by default now and add CI jobs with that enabled during a transitory period). Back when I made the series FW-independent with fwnode additions I felt in my interaction with the ACPI folks that there's a bit of a chasm in this issue between embedded and non-embedded people. This could be because with ACPI most of the low-level hw elements such as clocks, regulators, gpios and pins are hidden from the kernel and are already ready when we start probing devices. With DT, the kernel has to initialize all those and only then it can initialize the higher level devices that depend on them. This means lots more of devices and dependencies and thus we feel more acutely the shortcomings of the current device framework at the scale we are using it today. I think that having all dependencies be explicit and represented in the device-driver model, along with a more advanced method of ordering probes is something that would be good to have at this moment, even if it won't benefit all users of the kernel. Thanks, Tomeu -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe devicetree" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
