Re: [PATCH 3/4] mfd: dln2: add support for ACPI

[Octavian Purdila]

On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 12:09 AM, Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thursday, January 22, 2015 12:13:13 PM Octavian Purdila wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 4:00 AM, Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<snip>
>> The idea here is to set the companion for the MFD sub-devices. Mika's
>> commit "mfd: Add ACPI support" propagates the parent's companion to
>> the MFD sub-devices, so it is sufficient to set the ACPI companion to
>> the USB device.
>
> For the USB device itself you'll then end up with an incomplete binding (you
> can't get back to the USB device from the ACPI object), so no, it isn't
> sufficient.
>
>> Then, the companion will be propagated to the sub-devices after which
>> acpi_bind_one() will be called for the sub-devices from
>> mfd_add_devices (via platform_device_add -> device_add ->
>> platform_notify).
>
> In fact, your use case doesn't seem to cover any of the use cases that
> the Mika's commit addressed.  Namely, your parent device doesn't have
> an ACPI companion to start with and you want your MFD cells to be bound
> to the "DLN2000" thing.  That's why you're setting the ACPI companion
> for the USB device, isn't it?
>
>> It is true that the USB dev will have its ACPI companion set without
>> having acpi_bind_one called but I do not see any harm in that. Even
>> though acpi_unbind_one() is called it will not find the USB dev on the
>> physical node list so no put_device() imbalance is caused.
>
> Well, there are places where it matters.  Some links in sysfs will be missing
> for one example.  Also please see the changelog of commit 52870786ff5d (ACPI:
> Use ACPI companion to match only the first physical device).
>
> Bottom line: You really should be using acpi_bind_one() here and
> acpi_unbind_one() on disconnect if you have to.
>

OK, I understand now.

>> > And no, "Let's come up with a patch that sort of works, throw it at the maintainers
>> > and see what happens" is not an acceptable approach, sorry.
>>
>> This patch is based on your feedback of the previous RFC patch set:
>
> Oh, is it?  I can't recall advising you to use request_firmware() for
> uploading ACPI tables or some other questionable things that the patch is
> doing.
>
> And if it still was an RFC, that wouldn't be a problem, but if you just send
> non-RFC patches out, that means you want people to merge them.  This is bad
> if the patches in question are not in a good enough shape and this one isn't.
>

Yes, this should have been tagged with RFC, sorry about that.

> Now, why is this a bad idea to load ACPI tables from a driver using
> request_firmware()?  Because those tables are not device firmare.  They are
> not firmware that you load into a device to make it work (which then works
> with all instances of the given hardware), they are part of system configuration
> information and have to match what's there in the system.  For instance, if you
> ship your example SSDT with a general-purpose distro, it may just not match the
> hardware configuration of systems that people will try to use it with.
>
> So, while it is sort of OK to look up "DLN2000" and bind the USB device to
> that by hand (although this looks ugly to me), it is not OK to load a random
> custom SSDT if it is missing.
>
> We need to add a generic mechanism for loading custom SSDTs not present in the
> firmware image and maybe even to load them on demand, but that cannot happen in
> an ad-hoc way.  So the entire table loading-unloading code in your patch can go
> away for now and you need to fail probing if the "DLN2000" ACPI object is not
> present.
>

That sounds interesting, I like the idea of a generic mechanism for
loading custom SSDTs. Do you have any initial thoughts/pointers for
starting that?

Thanks for the review and feedback.
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