Re: [PATCH v5] gpio: pca953x: Add Maxim MAX7313 PWM support

[Uwe Kleine-König <u.kleine-koenig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Miquèl,

On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 04:38:22PM +0100, Miquel Raynal wrote:
> One dumb question that I still have is: besides any backward
> compatibility aspects, do we really care about the period/frequency of
> the PWM? Why do we enforce a period and an active duration, while
> we could limit ourselves to a ratio and let the driver use the most
> suitable frequency if the hardware supports it?

There are situations where just fixing the ratio would (nearly) be good
enough. For example if you drive an LED just requesting a ratio might
look fine at first glance. But 

	.period = 5000 ms, .duty_cycle = 2500 ms

has quite a different effect than

	.period = 500 ns, .duty_cycle = 250 ns

while both are valid if you requested 50%.

Having said that I think the lowlevel API (i.e. what a device driver has
to implement) is sane, as it allows to implement all possible requests,
even if there might be a consumer that cares more about the absolute
value of duty-cycle than the duty-cycle/period ratio; and it matches
what most hardware models implement. There is usually a register to
specify the period and one to specify the duty-cycle.

And on top of that (at least once there is pwm_round_state()) you can
implement all sort of helper functions that implement for example "best
effort 50% with a period < 2ms".

Best regards
Uwe

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