Re: [linux-sunxi] [RFC 0/7] ARM: sun9i: SMP support with Multi-Cluster Power Management

From: Nicolas Pitre
Date: Mon May 18 2015 - 01:19:33 EST


On Sun, 17 May 2015, Maxime Ripard wrote:

> Hi Ian,
>
> On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 11:08:46AM +0100, Ian Campbell wrote:
> > On Thu, 2015-05-14 at 14:10 +0800, Chen-Yu Tsai wrote:
> > > This is my attempt to support SMP and CPU hot plugging on the Allwinner
> > > A80 SoC. The A80 is a big.Little processor with 2 clusters of 4x Cortex-A7
> > > and 4x Cortex-A15 cores.
> >
> > I thought there was a preference these days to support this sort of
> > thing via support PSCI in the firmware, which allows for other things
> > such as non-secure-world etc.
>
> Yes, it is the preferred way. Meaning that if someone wants to do that
> work, he's very much welcome and encouraged to do so. But if no one's
> doing it, then we still have to have a way to bringup the secondary
> CPUs.

And doing so in the kernel (at least initially) is simpler, and so much
easier to fix when it is broken. We've seen a few systems already where
power management is crippled because no one is able/allowed/willing to
fix the broken firmware.


Nicolas
--
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/