Re: [PATCH v1 11/30] drm/tegra: dc: Support OPP and SoC core voltage scaling

[Dmitry Osipenko]

13.11.2020 17:29, Mark Brown пишет:
> On Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 01:37:01AM +0300, Dmitry Osipenko wrote:
>> 12.11.2020 23:01, Mark Brown пишет:
>>>> But it's not allowed to change voltage of a dummy regulator, is it
>>>> intentional?
> 
>>> Of course not, we can't know if the requested new voltage is valid - the
>>> driver would have to have explict support for handling situations where
>>> it's not possible to change the voltage (which it can detect through
>>> enumerating the values it wants to set at startup).
> 
>>> [Requesting the same supply multiple times]
> 
>> But how driver is supposed to recognize that it's a dummy or buggy
>> regulator if it rejects all voltages?
> 
> It's not clear if it matters - it's more a policy decision on the part
> of the driver about what it thinks safe error handling is.  If it's not
> possible to read voltages from the regulator the consumer driver has to
> decide what it thinks it's safe for it to do, either way it has no idea
> what the actual current voltage is.  It could assume that it's something
> that supports all the use cases it wants to use and just carry on with
> no configuration of voltages, it could decide that it might not support
> everything and not make any changes to be safe, or do something like
> try to figure out that if we're currently at a given OPP that's the top
> OPP possible.  Historically when we've not had regulator control in
> these drivers so they have effectively gone with the first option of
> just assuming it's a generally safe value, this often aligns with what
> the power on requirements for SoCs are so it's not unreasonable.

I don't think that in a case of this particular driver there is a way to
make any decisions other than to assume that all changes are safe to be
done if regulator isn't specified in a device-tree.

If regulator_get() returns a dummy regulator, then this means that
regulator isn't specified in a device-tree. But then the only way for a
consumer driver to check whether regulator is dummy, is to check
presence of the supply property in a device-tree.

We want to emit error messages when something goes wrong, for example
when regulator voltage fails to change. It's fine that voltage changes
are failing for a dummy regulator, but then consumer driver shouldn't
recognize it as a error condition.

The regulator_get_optional() provides a more consistent and
straightforward way for consumer drivers to check presence of a physical
voltage regulator in comparison to dealing with a regulator_get(). The
dummy regulator is nice to use when there is no need to change
regulator's voltage, which doesn't work for a dummy regulator.