Re: [PATCH v4 5/5] clk: clk-mux: implement remuxing on set_rate

[Mike Turquette]

Quoting Doug Anderson (2013-06-11 18:01:01)
> Hi,
> 
> Mike pointed me at this series since I'm running into parenting
> problems at the moment as well...
> 
> On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 9:44 PM, Saravana Kannan <skannan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > While writing a similar code for our internal tree, I quickly came to the
> > realization that, "all parents are equal, but some are more equal than
> > others". The simplest example is a clock tree like this:
> >
> > Source -> Divider -> Mux
> > Source -> Mux
> >
> > A rate of Y can be achieved for Mux by either running Source at Y and
> > picking that input or running Source at Y * 2 and Divider set to div-2 and
> > picking the Divider input.
> >
> > The solution seems to be a priority list of parents. I'm sure there would be
> > other reason (jitter, clock quality, etc) for a mux to pick one parent vs.
> > another when both of them can provide the required rate.
> >
> > I think this loop should loop over parents based on their priority order.
> > So, parents should become a struct of { clk, index } and have the parents
> > listed in the order of priority. Well, at least in that long run that would
> > be better to avoid messing up parent/index values. But for now, you could
> > just have a priority array of index or parents.
> >
> > It might not fit 100% of the cases where two parents can provide the same
> > rate, but it should fit most use cases.
> 
> I'm slightly worried about similar problems, but I don't have a really
> great solution.
> 
> In my case I'm working on exynos5 hardware which has a bunch of PLLs
> and a crazy number of muxing options.  Many of the muxing options are
> not really meant to be used but seem to have been added to the SoC as
> a "backup plan" of some sort.  :-/  Most of the PLLs are intended to
> be used for one purpose and one purpose only though muxing options
> allow them to be used all over the place.
> 
> For instance if I look at my current bootup of exynos5250-snow, I see:
> 
> fout_apll/clk_rate:1700000000
> fout_bpll/clk_rate:800000000
> fout_cpll/clk_rate:333000000
> fout_epll/clk_rate:45158401
> fout_gpll/clk_rate:533000000
> fout_mpll/clk_rate:1600000000
> 
> * APLL is intended to be the parent of the 2 ARM cores and changes due
> to cpu load
> * EPLL is intended to be the parent for audio and changes dpending on
> audio playback rates.
> * GPLL is intended to be the parent of the GPU and changes due to gpu load
> * VPLL is intended to be the parent for video related things and could
> change depending on the LCD.
> * MPLL doesn't change a lot and is intended to be the parent for most things.
> * In some systems BPLL can be used for memory or GPU
> 
> My main concern here is the CCF will end up deciding at some point
> that it should reparent some clock onto a PLL that is going to change
> a whole lot.  Maybe the user will plug in an SD card that requests a
> frequency of 52MHz and at the moment we'll be running EPLL at 104 MHz
> so it will be a perfect match!  ...but then the user wants to play
> audio at a different rate.  The audio code assumes that it can mess
> with its clock and we've got code setup to call CLK_SET_RATE_PARENT
> all the way up to EPLL.  That will really mess with the SD card.
> Really we'd rather just have the SD card clock always parented on the
> stable MPLL and it's OK if 52MHz gets rounded down to 50MHz.
> 
> Of course, on another board maybe they don't have an audio codec and
> aren't using epll for audio and have realized that EPLL would be a
> perfect way to get their SD card to run 4% faster.  It ought to work.
> 
> 
> I guess to summarize the above:
> 
> * It seems like much of the muxing on exynos5250 is just too
> complicated to leave it to an simple automated algorithm.

I'd wager this will be true at the PLL-level for most complex SoCs.
Having a general re-muxing algorithm makes a lot more sense for simpler
cases like a fast 100MHz parent and a slow 32KHz parent, and the
requested rate makes it painfully obvious which one to pick.  This is
less true for PLLs that can provide a very wide range of frequencies and
have lots of children.

This is analogous to lots of the other basic clock types where we try to
have common code that benefits a wide range of users, but if you need
something custom then you implement a new clock type/driver.  If you
have a limited set of combinations that you want to support out of many
possible combinations (e.g. your "backup muxing options") then it might
be better for you to skip the remuxing algorithm and instead call
clk_set_parent explicitly from your clock driver, perhaps in your
clock's .set_rate and/or .set_parent callbacks.

> * It seems like we can't make muxing decisions on the SoC level.
> * Your automatic muxing patches don't hurt me and could be useful for
> _some_ of the muxing options, just not the top PLL ones.

For the time being you won't be affected by this until you start using
.determine_rate.  Even then we have the flag which disables this
behavior.

> 
> ...but the only place that leaves me for my muxing needs is the device
> tree.  ...and as Mike pointed out on IRC the device tree should
> describe hardware, not policy.  Ick.

This sounds like another vote for configtree ;-)

Regards,
Mike

> 
> -Doug
--
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/