Re: [PATCH v11 0/6] Solve postboot supplier cleanup and optimize probe ordering

[Greg Kroah-Hartman]

On Wed, Sep 04, 2019 at 02:11:19PM -0700, Saravana Kannan wrote:
> Add device-links to track functional dependencies between devices
> after they are created (but before they are probed) by looking at
> their common DT bindings like clocks, interconnects, etc.
> 
> Having functional dependencies automatically added before the devices
> are probed, provides the following benefits:
> 
> - Optimizes device probe order and avoids the useless work of
>   attempting probes of devices that will not probe successfully
>   (because their suppliers aren't present or haven't probed yet).
> 
>   For example, in a commonly available mobile SoC, registering just
>   one consumer device's driver at an initcall level earlier than the
>   supplier device's driver causes 11 failed probe attempts before the
>   consumer device probes successfully. This was with a kernel with all
>   the drivers statically compiled in. This problem gets a lot worse if
>   all the drivers are loaded as modules without direct symbol
>   dependencies.
> 
> - Supplier devices like clock providers, interconnect providers, etc
>   need to keep the resources they provide active and at a particular
>   state(s) during boot up even if their current set of consumers don't
>   request the resource to be active. This is because the rest of the
>   consumers might not have probed yet and turning off the resource
>   before all the consumers have probed could lead to a hang or
>   undesired user experience.
> 
>   Some frameworks (Eg: regulator) handle this today by turning off
>   "unused" resources at late_initcall_sync and hoping all the devices
>   have probed by then. This is not a valid assumption for systems with
>   loadable modules. Other frameworks (Eg: clock) just don't handle
>   this due to the lack of a clear signal for when they can turn off
>   resources. This leads to downstream hacks to handle cases like this
>   that can easily be solved in the upstream kernel.
> 
>   By linking devices before they are probed, we give suppliers a clear
>   count of the number of dependent consumers. Once all of the
>   consumers are active, the suppliers can turn off the unused
>   resources without making assumptions about the number of consumers.
> 
> By default we just add device-links to track "driver presence" (probe
> succeeded) of the supplier device. If any other functionality provided
> by device-links are needed, it is left to the consumer/supplier
> devices to change the link when they probe.

Hearing no real complaints again, I've now queued these up in my tree.

thanks,

greg k-h