Re: [PATCH] drivers: pinctrl: add active state to core

[Stephen Warren]

On 06/12/2013 12:33 PM, Tony Lindgren wrote:
> * Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@xxxxxxxxxx> [130611 12:59]:
>> On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 6:33 PM, Stephen Warren <swarren@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> On 06/11/2013 02:16 AM, Linus Walleij wrote:
>>>> From: Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@xxxxxxxxxx>
>>>>
>>>> In addition to the recently introduced pinctrl core
>>>> control, the PM runtime pin control for the OMAP platforms
>>>> require a fourth state in addtition to the default, idle and
>>>> sleep states already handled by the core: an explicit "active"
>>>> state. Let's introduce this to the core in addition to the
>>>> other states already defined.
>>>
>>> Surely "default" /is/ "active"? That's what it's meant so far.
>>
>> I thought so too, until Tony informed us that in the OMAP world
>> this state is not always the active one.
>>
>> But I don't know the exact reasons for.
>>
>> I guess that some "default" states on the OMAP may mean these
>> are configured as decoupled, inactive, until explicitly activated
>> or something like that.
> 
> The main reason is that remuxing all the pins for a device for
> PM runtime suspend and resume is not necessary. Most pins are
> static and configured once during the consumer driver probe.
> And in most cases, remuxing only one pin for the rx line is
> needed. This is performance critical as it may need to be done
> constantly while entering and exiting idle, and remuxing all the
> pins is just a waste of cycles.

Then isn't the correct solution to optimize the code that switches
between states, so that it only reprograms the pins/groups necessary?
Inventing extra states just to work around that issue seems quite wrong.

So, I think you're relying on:

default: Set up everything static.
active: flip just a few pins to active state.
idle: flip just a few pins to idle state.

... and assuming that the default->active or default->idle transitions
will not affect any pins that are used in default, but not used in
active/idle.

However, that very specifically isn't the case; pinctrl drivers are
allowed to force unused pins back to some default unused state when the
pinctrl state that's being switched to doesn't mention them, and hence
this concept won't work in general.

Also, if default uses more pins that active, when you switch to active,
those pins won't be marked as owned any more, I think, so something else
could in theory grab them. At least, debugfs wouldn't be entirely
accurate any more.
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