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Date:   Fri, 20 May 2022 22:58:03 +0300
From:   Boris Lysov <arz65xx@gmail.com>
To:     AngeloGioacchino Del Regno 
        <angelogioacchino.delregno@collabora.com>
Cc:     Chen-Yu Tsai <wenst@chromium.org>,
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Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 7/7] clk: mediatek: Add MediaTek Helio X10 MT6795
 clock drivers
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        <20220519045340.11198-1-miles.chen@mediatek.com>
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        <CAGXv+5H4gF5GXzfk8mjkG4Kry8uCs1CQbKoViBuc9LC+XdHH=A@mail.gmail.com>
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Hello, I'd like to chime in with some feedback.

> >> Hence, the usecases for this kind of splitting are:
> >> 1. Somewhat rare (corner) cases: someone may not want to compile in any of
> >> the mm/venc/vdec/mfg clock drivers because they don't need the
> >> functionality at all (probably, including the other related drivers), or;
> >> 2. It would be possible to compile as built-in only the "main" drivers
> >> (apmixed, infra, peri, topck) to achieve a boot (ex.: you need eMMC to
> >> boot, at least) and then compile the mm/venc/vdec/mfg as modules to be
> >> loaded after mounting a rootfs (where you probably also have mediatek-drm,
> >> vcodec, etc as modules).
> > 
> > I assume you mean split them into two groups:
> > 
> >    - essential for booting to a state capable of loading modules from
> > storage So apmixedsys + topckgen + infra_ao + peri_ao + imp_iic_wrap
> > (maybe?)
> >    - everything else
> { snip }
> > IMO having two Kconfig symbols for one chip is still much better than
> > having ten though.
This sounds good.

I think it would've been even better if selecting a Kconfig option like
MACH_MT6795 would automatically select the base clock driver for booting to a
state capable of loading modules from storage. But a quick check showed me that
arm64 doesn't use such an approach unlike arm.

> For MT8195... and 92, 83, 73... and others from the same era, being them for
> chromebooks, iot, smartphones and whatever else... yeah you're totally right.
> 
> The issue starts raising when looking at older SoCs featuring an older
> bootloader that does have a kernel size limitation; for example, to make the
> loader happy on MT6795, I had to strip the defconfig a lot and keep the
> Android-style boot.img smaller than 10MB (that's Image.gz-dtb + ramdisk).
This issue gets even more relevant if/when we consider older ARM32 SoCs such as
mt65xx series. As far as I know, most of them (with a notable exception of
mt6580) have bootloaders that restrict max boot.img size to 6144 kB.

However, I think too much granularity in Kconfig might cause unnecessary
confusion. The "essential clock infra" + "everything else" split sounds better
to me.