Re: [PATCH 1/3] ARM: Introduce atomic MMIO clear/set

From: Ezequiel Garcia
Date: Mon Aug 12 2013 - 13:09:12 EST


Sebastian,

On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 06:44:10PM +0200, Sebastian Hesselbarth wrote:
> On 08/12/13 17:46, Ezequiel Garcia wrote:
> >> Indeed, syscon looks like a nice match for this use case.
> >> (although it still looks like an overkill to me).
> >>
> >> I've been trying to implement a working solution based in syscon but I'm
> >> unable to overcome an issue.
> >>
> >> The problem is that we need the register/regmap to initialize the clocksource
> >> driver for this machine (aka the timer). Of course, this happens at a
> >> *very* early point, way before the syscon driver is available... :-(
> >>
> >> Maybe someone has an idea?
> >
> > Sebastian, Russell: I can't find the previous mail where you proposed
> > this solution to address the shared register issue between Kirkwood's
> > watchdog and clocksource.
>
> Russell first mentioned an atomic modify function here:
> http://archive.arm.linux.org.uk/lurker/message/20130618.113606.d7d4fe4b.en.html
>

Thanks a lot for finding this thread. I see we all just went through the
same line of reasoning.

>
> The pro of a generic atomic clear/set is that we can use it
> very early, on all platforms, and from totally unrelated
> drivers. As you already mentioned, using syscon from timers will
> get us into into trouble, because it has not been registered.
>

Yes, indeed.

> > Do you think trying to use a regmap could be better (given we can
> > sort out the problem explained above)?
>
> Given the small number of registers we need to protect and especially
> for using it in timers, I'd prefer your proposal. Otherwise, I guess,
> we would have to mimic mfd/syscon for time-orion and time-armada-370-xp
> and make wdt-orion depend on it. I doubt we can make any use of
> mfd/syscon for the timer use case.
>

Then I think we all agree here. Just to confirm:

* The proposed API is almost exactly the one proposed by Russell
in the mail you just mentioned:
http://archive.arm.linux.org.uk/lurker/message/20130618.113606.d7d4fe4b.en.html

* Linus Walleij suggested mfd/syscon, but Russell, Mark and Linus
itself seem to agree it's more heavy-weight than necessary.
http://archive.arm.linux.org.uk/lurker/message/20130618.151116.712407e0.en.html
http://archive.arm.linux.org.uk/lurker/message/20130618.183359.a6184b7f.en.html
http://archive.arm.linux.org.uk/lurker/message/20130618.152300.bffa038f.en.html

The only open question is: given there's nothing arch-dependent in this
mechanism, should we keep this in arch/arm/kernel? And if not, where
should we move this?
--
Ezequiel GarcÃa, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android Engineering
http://free-electrons.com
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/