Re: [PATCH] [RFC] pinctrl: add a driver for Energy Micro's efm32 SoCs

[Dong Aisheng]

2011/12/9 Stephen Warren <swarren@xxxxxxxxxx>:
> On 12/08/2011 09:32 PM, Shawn Guo wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 08, 2011 at 08:44:03PM -0700, Stephen Warren wrote:
>>> On 12/08/2011 06:01 PM, Shawn Guo wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Dec 08, 2011 at 03:14:40PM -0800, Stephen Warren wrote:
>>>>> Presumably, the set of pins, groups, and functions is determined by the
>>>>> SoC HW. Platform data is usually board-specific rather than SoC specific.
>>>>> You have two choices here: You could either parse this data from device
>>>>> tree as Arnd suggested (and I think as the TI OMAP pinctrl driver will),
>>>>> or do what I've done in the Tegra pinctrl driver, and simply put each
>>>>> SoC's data into the driver and select which one to use based on the DT
>>>>> compatible flag; I didn't see the point of putting data in to the DT that
>>>>> was identical for every board using a given SoC.
>>>>>
>>>> I'm not sure about tegra, but for imx, it's very difficult to enumerate
>>>> all these data and list them in pinctrl driver.  Sascha gave a few
>>>> examples when we discussed about it in another thread.  The TX and RX
>>>> pin of UART has 4 options each.  SD could possibly have 1, 4, and 8
>>>> data lines.  Display interface could have 16, 24, 32 data lines, etc.
>>>> All these options are chosen by board design for given soc pinmux
>>>> design.  So putting this data into device tree makes sense for imx too.
>>>
>>> The pinctrl driver should simply represent the raw options that the HW
>>> supports on each individual pin. This table should be readily enumerable
> ...
>> The situation is there might be a few possible pin groups for each
>> function of 16/24/32-bit display.   Let's think about the UART case
>> I put above, to enumerate all the groups, we will have 16 groups for
>> one UART instance.  And we have 5 UART ports on recent imx SoC.
>
> I'm not familiar with imx. For my education, which of the following is true:
>
> a)
>
> * UART TX signal can muxed onto 1 of 16 pins
> * UART RX signal can muxed onto 1 of 16 pins
>
> In this case, you'd just list say "UART A TX" as a legal function for
> each of those 16 pins. Yes, that's a lot of places, but still do-able.
>
Yes,  it's a way to fix the issue Sascha raised.
But it will increase the code size heavily and using complexity.
Passing table from pdata or devicetree has another benifit that it will make
things simple since board knows which function uses which pin group,
that means you do not have to define all possible pin groups for one function.

> (16 possible positions would be a lot, but I suppose it is possible in HW)
>
> b)
>
> * UART TX signal can muxed onto 1 of 4 pins
> * UART RX signal can muxed onto 1 of 4 pins
> * So, there are 16 (4*4) combinations of these two settings
>
> In this case, you'd just list say "UART A TX" for the 4 pins, and "UART
> A RX" for the other 4 pins. The 16 combinations don't come into play at
> all; the board-specific mapping table would pick 1 single combination,
> and represent this as:
>
> pin X: function = UART A TX
> pin Y: function = UART A RX
>
> Either way though, whether you put the data into tables in the driver or
> in the SoC .dtsi file (included by each board's .dts file), the pinctrl
> driver's table really should list all possible options, and the pinctrl
> mapping table should select just one; that's kinda the whole point of
> the tables. If you try to put just the used subset into device tree, you
> won't be able to put it into the .dtsi file since it'll be
> board-specific, and you'll end up forcing board .dts authors to recreate
> that driver's complete configuration table every time, which seems like
> a lot of wasted work. (and yes, this might bloat the .dtsi file, and
> mean a lot of useless device tree parsing, which is why I personally
> chose not to put the SoC tables into the device tree).
>
I agree that parsing data from device tree increases much effort
because we can not using any help functions like microes in dts file and we have
to construct the structure we need in driver by parsing that data.
And it will increase dtsi file's size a lot when after adding all functions.

I wonder if we can define that data as a pdata in a .c file and only
get a pointer
from dts file. That would make life much easier.

Anyway, we're trying the way of parsing data from devicetree now for mx6q
pinmux driver.
I will send out patches soon when it's done for the discussion.

> Thanks.
>
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