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From:   Andrew Jeffery <andrew@aj.id.au>
To:     Rob Herring <robh@kernel.org>
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Date:   Thu, 19 Jul 2018 11:27:13 +0930
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v2 1/4] dt-bindings: misc: Add bindings for misc. BMC
 control fields
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On Thu, 19 Jul 2018, at 04:37, Rob Herring wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 17, 2018 at 5:28 PM Andrew Jeffery <andrew@aj.id.au> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, 17 Jul 2018, at 14:26, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> > > On Mon, 2018-07-16 at 07:55 -0600, Rob Herring wrote:
> > > > If that data is one set per SoC, then i'm not that concerned having
> > > > platform-specific data in the driver. That doesn't mean the driver is
> > > > not "generic". It's still not clear to me in this thread, how much of
> > > > this is board specific, but given that you've placed all the data in
> > > > an SoC dtsi file it seems to be all per SoC.
> > >
> > > So Rob, I think that's precisely where the disconnect is.
> > >
> > > I think we all (well hopefully) agree that those few tunables don't fit
> > > in any existing subystem and aren't likely to ever do (famous last
> > > words...).
> > >
> > > Where we disagree is we want to make this parametrized via the DT, and
> > > you want us to hard wire the list in some kind of SoC driver for a
> > > given SoC family/version.
> > >
> > > The reason I think hard wiring the list in the driver is not a great
> > > solution is that that list in itself is prone to variations, possibly
> > > fairly often, between boards, vendors, versions of boards, etc...
> > >
> > > We can't know for sure every SoC tunable (out of the gazillions in
> > > those chips) are going to be needed for a given system. We know which
> > > ones we do use for ours, and that's a couple of handfuls, but it could
> > > be that Dell need a slightly different set, and so might Yadro, or so
> > > might our next board revision for that matter.
> > >
> > > Now, updating the device-tree in the board flash with whatever vendor
> > > specific information is needed is a LOT easier than getting the kernel
> > > driver constantly updated. The device-tree after all is there to
> > > reflect among other things system specific ways in which the SoC is
> > > wired and configured. This is rather close...
> >
> > Not sure this helps, but I feel that the proposal pretty closely matches what's described in Documentation/devicetree/bindings/mfd/mfd.txt. It's intended that nodes using the bindings I'm proposing are children of a 'compatible = "syscon", "simple-mfd"' node (this is the case with the features we're hoping to describe for our SoC). I should explicitly call that out.
> 
> IMO, any binding that has only those compatibles is not correct and a
> specific compatible is needed. We should be able identify a specific
> h/w block.

I didn't intend for that to get interpreted quite as literally, so apologies for that. We do have h/w-block-specific compatibles in there too. The point was to demonstrate that we're dealing (at this point, only) with mfds/syscons.

> 
> > But to go on, "simple-mfd" is effectively an alias of "simple-bus", which means its intended to match child node compatibles to drivers provided by the kernel. If we shouldn't be describing minor features of a SoC in the devicetree, doesn't this invalidate the case for simple-mfd? What is the *correct* use of simple-mfd? When is it not used to expose minor features in set of "miscellaneous system registers"? Why doesn't this proposed case fit?
> 
> I'm no fan of simple-mfd either. I think it is abused and often a sign
> of bad binding design.

Ah, yes, this is a familiar feeling when reflecting on things I've done in the past. Hence trying to understand how to use it right.

> The general problem with MFD bindings is people
> define child nodes based on what drivers they happen to have for some
> OS. DT is not the only way to instantiate drivers. Child nodes are
> really only needed when you have resources per child that need to be
> defined. For example, if the MFD has an interrupt controller and
> interrupts to sub-blocks or sub-blocks have their own clocks.
> "simple-mfd" was for when the parent node has no driver or the child
> nodes have no dependency on the parent.

Thanks for the clarification, I'll keep that in mind going forward.

Andrew