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Message-ID: <ecfa135b7b83a31bed821ec0740ab3cf1d39da15.camel@ew.tq-group.com>
Subject: spi-imx: correct interpretation of num-cs DT property?
From:   Matthias Schiffer <matthias.schiffer@ew.tq-group.com>
To:     Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org>, Rob Herring <robh+dt@kernel.org>
Cc:     Shawn Guo <shawnguo@kernel.org>,
        Sascha Hauer <s.hauer@pengutronix.de>,
        Fabio Estevam <festevam@gmail.com>,
        NXP Linux Team <linux-imx@nxp.com>,
        linux-spi@vger.kernel.org, devicetree@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Date:   Thu, 03 Sep 2020 11:22:20 +0200
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Hi,

I've recently had a discussion about the correct way for an SPI driver
to handle the num-cs property: https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/8/25/184

Since 8cdcd8aeee281 ("spi: imx/fsl-lpspi: Convert to GPIO
descriptors"), the logic of the spi-imx driver is somewhat confusing:
If fewer than 3 cs-gpios are defined, and no explicit num-cs property
exists, the driver will set num_chipselect to 3 by default, instead of
the number of cs-gpios entries.

To avoid having to specify num-cs when the number cs-gpios would
suffice, I suggested to modify the logic to the following:

- If num-cs is set, use that
- If num-cs is unset, use the number of cs-gpios
- If num-cs is unset and no cs-gpios are defined, use a driver-provided 
default (which is 3 for spi-imx; this matches the number of native CS
pins in older implementations of this SPI controller; i.MX6 and newer
support up to 4)

Also, would it make sense to add num-cs to all DTS files for boards
that actually use fewer than 3 CS pins?

At the moment, the num-cs property is not explicitly documented for the
spi-imx driver, although the driver understands it. I also suggested to
add this to the docs, which Fabio didn't deem a good idea (I don't
quite understand the reasoning here - isn't num-cs generally a useful
property to have?)

Kind regards,
Matthias