Re: Armada DRM: bridge with componentized devices

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On Mon, Jan 7, 2019 at 5:27 PM Andrzej Hajda <a.hajda@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 07.01.2019 17:08, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 07, 2019 at 12:26:58PM +0100, Andrzej Hajda wrote:
> >> On 07.01.2019 11:45, Daniel Vetter wrote:
> >>> On Thu, Jan 03, 2019 at 01:11:47PM +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> >>>> On Thu, Jan 03, 2019 at 10:47:27AM +0100, Lubomir Rintel wrote:
> >>>>> Hello,
> >>>>>
> >>>>> lately I've been trying to make the Himax HX8837 chip that drives the OLPC
> >>>>> LCD display work with Armada DRM driver. I've been advised to create a
> >>>>> bridge driver and not an encoder driver since the silicon is separate from
> >>>>> the LCDC.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> The Armada DRM driver (and, I think, the i.MX one) creates the drm_device
> >>>>> once the component infrastructure sees the necessary sub-devices appear.
> >>>>> The sub-devices being the LCDCs and the encoders (not bridges) that it
> >>>>> expects to be created externally.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Currently, it seems, the only driver that can actually work with this (that
> >>>>> is -- creates a drm_encoder for a drm_device when the component is bound)
> >>>>> is the tda998x. All other similar drivers create a drm_bridge instead and
> >>>>> not use the component infrastructure at all. (In fact, tilcdc driver
> >>>>> contains a  hack to handle tda998x specially.)
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I'm wondering how to reconcile the two?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> * The tda998x driver has recently been modified to create a bridge on probe
> >>>>>   and eventually encoder on component bind. Is this an okay thing to do in
> >>>>>   a new driver? (this probably means the tilcdc hack can be removed...)
> >>>>>
> >>>>> * If a non-componentized bridge were to be used (along with a dummy
> >>>>>   encoder), at what point would it make sense to look for the bridge?
> >>>>>   Would it be a good idea to defer the probe of crtc until a bridge can be
> >>>>>   looked up and the attach it on component bind?  What if the bridge goes
> >>>>>   away (a module is unloaded, etc.) in between?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I'd be thankful for opintions and advice before I move ahead with this.
> >>>> This is the long-standing problem with the conflict between bridge
> >>>> support and component support, and I'm not sure that there is really
> >>>> any answer to it.
> >>>>
> >>>> I've gone into the details of the two several times on the list,
> >>>> particularly about the short-comings of the bridge approach, but it
> >>>> seems no one cares to fix those short-comings.
> >>>>
> >>>> You are re-identifying some of the issues that I've already pointed
> >>>> out - such as what happens to DRM drives when the bridge driver is
> >>>> unbound (it's really not about modules being unloaded, and the problem
> >>>> can't be solved by taking a module reference count - all that the
> >>>> module reference count does is ensure that the module doesn't go
> >>>> away unexpected, there is no way to ensure that the device isn't
> >>>> unbound.)
> >>>>
> >>>> The issue of unbinding is precisely the issue which the component
> >>>> support was created to solve - but everyone seems to prefer the buggy
> >>>> bridge approach, and no one seems willing to do anything about the
> >>>> bugs or even acknowledge that it's a problem.  It's strange - if one
> >>>> identifies bugs that result in kernel oops in other kernel subsystems,
> >>>> one is generally taken seriously and the problem is solved.
> >>> Unbinding is really not the most important feature, especially for SoC. If
> >>> you feel different, working together with others, getting some agreement,
> >>> getting the patches reviewed and finding someone to get them merged is
> >>> very much appreciated. But just complaining won't move this forward.
> >>>
> >>>> The issue about the encoders is something that I've tried to discuss,
> >>>> and I've pointed out that moving it into the DRM driver adds additional
> >>>> complexity there, and I'd hoped that my patch set I posted would've
> >>>> generated discussion, but alas not.
> >>>>
> >>>> What I'm not prepared to do is to introduce _known_ bugs into any
> >>>> driver that I maintain.
> >>> I thought last time around the idea was to use device links (and teach
> >>> drm_bridge about them), so that the unloading works correctly.
> >>
> >> With current device_links implementation registering links in probe of
> >> the consumer is just incorrect - it can happen that neither consumer
> >> neither provider is fully probed and creating device links in such state
> >> is wrong according to docs, and my experiments. See [1] for discussion
> >> and [2] for docs.
> > We could set up the device link only at drm_dev_register time. At that point
> > we know that driver loading has fully succeeded. We do have a list of
> > bridges at hand, so that's not going to be an issue.
> >
> > The only case where this breaks is if a driver is still using the
> > deprecated ->load callback. But that ->load callback doesn't mix well with
> > EDEFER_PROBE/component framework anyway, so I think not going to be a
> > problem hopefully?
>
>
> drm_dev_register usually is called from bind callback, which is called from probe callback of one of the components or master (depending on particular probe order). If you want to register device link in this function it is possible that the bad scenario will happen - there will be attempt to create device link between not-yet-probed consumer and not-yet-probed provider.

If you call drm_dev_register before you have all the components
assembled (i.e. anywhere else than in master bind) that sounds like a
driver bug. drm_dev_register publishes the drm device instance to the
world, if you're not ready to handle userspace requests at that point
(because not everything is loaded yet) then things will go boom in
very colorful ways. And from my (admittedly very rough) understanding
we should be able to register the the device links as the very last
step in the master bind function (and drm_dev_register should be about
the last thing you do in the master bind).

So not clear on why this won't work?
-Daniel
--
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
+41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch
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