Re: [PATCH v8 0/6] Support running driver's probe for a device powered off

[Tomasz Figa]

Hi Sakari,

On Thu, Sep 03, 2020 at 11:15:44AM +0300, Sakari Ailus wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> These patches enable calling (and finishing) a driver's probe function
> without powering on the respective device on busses where the practice is
> to power on the device for probe. While it generally is a driver's job to
> check the that the device is there, there are cases where it might be
> undesirable. (In this case it stems from a combination of hardware design
> and user expectations; see below.) The downside with this change is that
> if there is something wrong with the device, it will only be found at the
> time the device is used. In this case (the camera sensors + EEPROM in a
> sensor) I don't see any tangible harm from that though.
> 
> An indication both from the driver and the firmware is required to allow
> the device's power state to remain off during probe (see the first patch).
> 
> 
> The use case is such that there is a privacy LED next to an integrated
> user-facing laptop camera, and this LED is there to signal the user that
> the camera is recording a video or capturing images. That LED also happens
> to be wired to one of the power supplies of the camera, so whenever you
> power on the camera, the LED will be lit, whether images are captured from
> the camera --- or not. There's no way to implement this differently
> without additional software control (allowing of which is itself a
> hardware design decision) on most CSI-2-connected camera sensors as they
> simply have no pin to signal the camera streaming state.
> 
> This is also what happens during driver probe: the camera will be powered
> on by the I²C subsystem calling dev_pm_domain_attach() and the device is
> already powered on when the driver's own probe function is called. To the
> user this visible during the boot process as a blink of the privacy LED,
> suggesting that the camera is recording without the user having used an
> application to do that. From the end user's point of view the behaviour is
> not expected and for someone unfamiliar with internal workings of a
> computer surely seems quite suspicious --- even if images are not being
> actually captured.
> 
> I've tested these on linux-next master. They also apply to Wolfram's
> i2c/for-next branch, there's a patch that affects the I²C core changes
> here (see below). The patches apart from that apply to Bartosz's
> at24/for-next as well as Mauro's linux-media master branch.

Besides the suggestion to make the defintions added less specific to i2c
(but still keeping the implementation so for now), feel free to add:

Reviewed-by: Tomasz Figa <tfiga@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

Best regards,
Tomasz