Re: [PATCH] regulator: do not balance 'boot-on' coupled regulators without constraints

[Saravana Kannan]

On Fri, Jun 5, 2020 at 8:59 AM Mark Brown <broonie@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jun 05, 2020 at 03:37:32PM +0200, Marek Szyprowski wrote:
> > On 05.06.2020 12:20, Mark Brown wrote:
>
> > > No, this is not what boot-on means at all.  It is there for cases where
> > > we can't read the enable status from the hardware.  Trying to infer
> > > *anything* about the runtime behaviour from it being present or absent
> > > is very badly broken.
>
> > Okay, what about the 'always-on' property? I don't think that we need
> > another property for annotating this behavior, as in my opinion this is
>
> No, that's just as disconnected from the need - we may as well do it
> based on the regulator name being an odd number of characters.
>
> > just an implementation issue on the Linux kernel and regulator
> > framework. Alternatively I can drop the property check, but then it
> > won't be possible to have a regulator without a consumer, which follows
> > the other one (although we still don't have a real use case for it).
>
> > If you don't like this idea at all, I will try to move this logic to the
> > custom coupler again, although it would mean some code copying.
>
> I think that's better TBH.
>
> > > Saravana (CCed) was working on some patches which tried to deal with
> > > some stuff around this for enables using the sync_state() callback.
> > > Unfortunately there's quite a few problems with the current approach
> > > (the biggest one from my point of view being that it's implemented so
> > > that it requires every single consumer of every device on the PMIC to
> > > come up but there's others at more of an implementation level).
>
> > I'm not sure if we really need such complex solution for this...
>
> So I think that the specific approach there is overly heavyweight and
> restrictive but I do see the general use case here for something per
> regulator providing we can avoid breaking anything that does actually
> need to change the regulator state (eg, raising the voltage for
> cpufreq).

The changes I propose won't prevent anything from asking for more
power/energy (will always allow turning on stuff, increasing voltage,
increasing current, etc). It'll only prevent reducing power lower than
what was provided when the bootloader left stuff on. This shouldn't
break most boards -- because any other consumer could be setting
similar limits and things don't break then. But even if that's a
concern, we can still default to a timeout behavior and then give
folks the choice of disabling the timeout if they know all their
devices will probe.

Btw, the patch series I sent fixes a lot of subtle use cases even with
the timeout enabled. For example, in one hardware platform, a LDO is
shared between camera, display, UFS and USB. The camera driver would
probe first, enable the regulator, poll its HW and then disable the
regulator. This causes the regulator to be disabled before display,
UFS, and USB could probe and this caused hardware faults for those.

> Previously to the past week I'd only really heard about it
> causing problems in the context of displays left on by the bootloader
> glitching during boot but this is a concrete

Ah, finally! I have examples of pretty much the same issue in some
downstream kernels -- the CPU and memory shares rails with other
hardware blocks and things fail if this isn't taken care of. Glad that
someone else found an example for me in the upstream kernel.

> use case and we already
> have the infrastructure to track dependencies at the device model level
> if we use it well.

I'll send out a v3 series in a couple of days to address Mark's
earlier comments and also add the voltage support to address Marek's
case. We can take it from there.

-Saravana