Re: [PATCH 11/15] thermal: thermal: Add support for hardware-tracked trip points

[Sascha Hauer]

On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 11:44:33AM -0700, Brian Norris wrote:
> On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 02:09:44PM +0200, Sascha Hauer wrote:
> > On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 12:06:50PM +0300, Mikko Perttunen wrote:
> > > One interesting thing I noticed was that at least the bang-bang
> > > governor only acts if the temperature is properly smaller than (trip
> > > temp - hysteresis). So perhaps we should specify the non-tripping
> > > range as [low, high)? Or we could change bang-bang.
> > 
> > I wonder how we can protect against such off-by-one errors anyway.
> > Generally a hardware might operate on raw values rather than directly
> > in temperature values in °C. This means a driver for this must have
> > celsius_to_raw and raw_to_celsius conversion functions. Now it can
> > happen that due to rounding errors celsius_to_raw(Tcrit) returns a raw
> > value that when converted back to celsius is different from the
> > original value in °C. This would mean the hardware triggers an interrupt
> > for a trip point and the thermal core does not react because get_temp
> > actually returns a different temperature than previously programmed as
> > interrupt trigger. This way we would lose hot (or cold) events.
> 
> This also highlights another fact: there's a race between interrupt
> generation and temperature reading (->get_temp()). I would expect any
> hardware interrupt thermal sensor would also have a latched temperature
> reading to correspond with it, and there would be no guarantee that this
> latched temperature will match the polled reading seen once you reach
> thermal_zone_device_update(). So a hardware driver might report a
> thermal update, but the temperature reported to the core won't
> necessarily match what interrupt was meant for.
> 
> I have a patch that adds a thermal_zone_device_update_temp() API, so
> drivers can report the temperature along with the interrupt
> notification. (Such a patch also helps so that the driver can choose to
> round down on cold events and up on hot events, resolving your rounding
> issue too.)

Could you send me that patch? Thinking about it this might indeed work.
The only thing that a driver needs to make sure then is that it actually
at least one time reports a temperature beyond the currently programmed
thresholds. With the patch you describe a driver could simply do that by
ignoring the current ADC values and simply reporting the previously
desired values.

Sascha

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