On Wed, Sep 04, 2019 at 02:11:19PM -0700, Saravana Kannan wrote: > Add device-links to track functional dependencies between devices > after they are created (but before they are probed) by looking at > their common DT bindings like clocks, interconnects, etc. > > Having functional dependencies automatically added before the devices > are probed, provides the following benefits: > > - Optimizes device probe order and avoids the useless work of > attempting probes of devices that will not probe successfully > (because their suppliers aren't present or haven't probed yet). > > For example, in a commonly available mobile SoC, registering just > one consumer device's driver at an initcall level earlier than the > supplier device's driver causes 11 failed probe attempts before the > consumer device probes successfully. This was with a kernel with all > the drivers statically compiled in. This problem gets a lot worse if > all the drivers are loaded as modules without direct symbol > dependencies. > > - Supplier devices like clock providers, interconnect providers, etc > need to keep the resources they provide active and at a particular > state(s) during boot up even if their current set of consumers don't > request the resource to be active. This is because the rest of the > consumers might not have probed yet and turning off the resource > before all the consumers have probed could lead to a hang or > undesired user experience. > > Some frameworks (Eg: regulator) handle this today by turning off > "unused" resources at late_initcall_sync and hoping all the devices > have probed by then. This is not a valid assumption for systems with > loadable modules. Other frameworks (Eg: clock) just don't handle > this due to the lack of a clear signal for when they can turn off > resources. This leads to downstream hacks to handle cases like this > that can easily be solved in the upstream kernel. > > By linking devices before they are probed, we give suppliers a clear > count of the number of dependent consumers. Once all of the > consumers are active, the suppliers can turn off the unused > resources without making assumptions about the number of consumers. > > By default we just add device-links to track "driver presence" (probe > succeeded) of the supplier device. If any other functionality provided > by device-links are needed, it is left to the consumer/supplier > devices to change the link when they probe. Hearing no real complaints again, I've now queued these up in my tree. thanks, greg k-h
