Re: [RESEND PATCH v3 2/2] thermal: core: introduce thermal zone device mode control

[Matthias Kaehlcke]

Hi Enric,

On Wed, Jul 04, 2018 at 12:36:39PM +0200, Enric Balletbo i Serra wrote:
> Hi Matthias,
> 
> Sorry for late reply, my memory is bad so I need to look at this again. The
> patch was send some time ago and there are pending changes to do but then I
> switched. I'll take a look, but did you saw why this patch was not merged [1]?
> Maybe that could answer some of your questions.
> 
> Best regards,
>  Enric
> 
> [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/2/27/910

I missed this, thanks for the pointer!

> On 03/07/18 19:13, Matthias Kaehlcke wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 28, 2018 at 05:33:02PM -0700, Matthias Kaehlcke wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I stumbled across this patch since I'm currently poking around with
> >> early thermal bringup on a platform and this patch has been integrated
> >> in our development tree.
> >>
> >> I'm seeing some unexpected behaviors, which could entirely due to
> >> wrong expectation from my side. I only have some basic working
> >> knowledge of the thermal framework, just want to double check and
> >> perhaps learn a thing or two.
> >>
> >> On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 03:41:18PM +0100, Enric Balletbo i Serra wrote:
> >>> From: Zhang Rui <rui.zhang@xxxxxxxxx>
> >>>
> >>> Thermal "mode" sysfs attribute is introduced to enable/disable a thermal
> >>> zone, and .get_mode()/.set_mode() callback is introduced for platform
> >>> thermal driver to enable/disable the hardware thermal control logic. And
> >>> thermal core takes no action upon thermal zone enable/disable.
> >>>
> >>> Actually, this is not quite right because thermal core still pokes those
> >>> disabled thermal zones occasionally, e.g. upon system resume.
> >>>
> >>> To fix this, a new flag 'mode' is introduced in struct thermal_zone_device
> >>> to represent the thermal zone mode, and several decisions have been made
> >>> based on this flag, including
> >>> 1. check the thermal zone mode right after it's registered.
> >>> 2. skip updating thermal zone if the zone is disabled
> >>> 3. stop the polling timer when the thermal zone is disabled
> >>>
> >>> Note: basically, this patch doesn't affect the existing always-enabled
> >>> thermal zones much, with just one exception -
> >>> thermal zone .get_mode() must be well prepared to reflect the real thermal
> >>> zone status upon the thermal zone registration.
> >>
> >> From my perspective this looks like a pretty significant change. For
> >> the platform I'm working on I added a thermal zone to the device tree,
> >> with the expectation that it would be enabled. Judging from the code
> >> without this patch this expectation seems to be naive, since
> >> of-thermal.c sets tz->mode to THERMAL_DEVICE_DISABLED, so apparently
> >> either userspace or some driver should call _set_mode(tz,
> >> THERMAL_DEVICE_ENABLED). However even without this the thermal zone
> >> appears to be active (I didn't really test end-to-end yet, but at
> >> least thermal_zone_device_update() is called and calls
> >> handle_thermal_trip()). Not sure why this is the case with
> >> THERMAL_DEVICE_DISABLED, but before I learned about the existence of
> >> the flag my expectation was that the zone would be enabled.
> >>
> >> With this patch thermal_zone_device_update() is skipped if the zone
> >> hasn't been explictly enabled, which may be consistent with the state
> >> of 'tz->mode', but effectively changes the previous/current behavior.
> >>
> >> Not sure if I'm just dumbly overlooking something obvious or if there
> >> is an actual problem with of_thermal (and maybe others).
> > 
> > The problem is that there are now two 'mode' fields, tzd->mode and the
> > other typically tzd->devdata->mode, and tzd->mode is never set to enabled.
> > 
> >> thermal zone .get_mode() must be well prepared to reflect the real thermal
> >> zone status upon the thermal zone registration.
> > 
> > For of_thermal tzd->mode is initialized with the result of .get_mode()
> > when the zone is registered. At this time no sensor has been added
> > to the zone, hence the zone is disabled. When a sensor is added later
> > tzd->devdata->mode is set to enabled, however tzd->mode remains disabled:
> > 
> > tzd->mode = DISABLED
> > tzd->devdata->mode = DISABLED
> > 
> > of_parse_thermal_zones
> >   thermal_zone_device_register
> >     tzd->mode = tzd->get_mode() // => DISABLED
> > 
> > <sensor>_probe
> >   thermal_zone_of_sensor_register
> >     tzd->set_mode(THERMAL_DEVICE_ENABLED)
> >       tzd->devdata->mode = ENABLED
> > 
> > One way to fix this for of_thermal could be to setting tzd->mode in
> > .set_mode() in addition to setting tzd->devdata->mode. However this
> > feels like a workaround/hack. Personally I find it confusing to have
> > two mode fields for a thermal zone device. Maybe tzd->mode should
> > replace tzd->devdata->mode?
> >