Re: About clk maintainership [Was: Re: [PULL] Add variants of devm_clk_get for prepared and enabled clocks enabled clocks]

From: Andy Shevchenko
Date: Mon Aug 02 2021 - 13:13:48 EST


On Mon, Aug 2, 2021 at 7:38 PM Russell King (Oracle)
<linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 02, 2021 at 05:27:55PM +0200, Uwe Kleine-König wrote:
> > Hello Russell,
> > On Mon, Aug 02, 2021 at 10:48:10AM +0100, Russell King (Oracle) wrote:

...

> > > There have been several different approaches to wrapping things up,
> > > but here's a question: should we make it easier to do the lazy thing
> > > (get+enable) or should we make it easier to be power efficient?
> > > Shouldn't we be encouraging people to write power efficient drivers?
> >
> > Yeah, sounds compelling, but I wonder if that's of practical importance.
> > How many driver authors do you expect to lure into making a better
> > driver just because devm_clk_get_prepared() doesn't exist? In contrast:
> > How many drivers become simpler with devm_clk_get_prepared() and so
> > it becomes easier to maintain them and easier to spot bugs?
> > In the absence of devm_clk_get_prepared(), is it better that several
> > frameworks (or drivers) open code it?
>
> It probably depends on where you stand on power management and power
> efficiency issues. Personally, I would like to see more effort put
> into drivers to make them more power efficient, and I believe in the
> coming years, power efficiency is going to become a big issue.

While in the ideal world I 100% agree with the approach, IRL we have
to deal with constantly degrading quality of the code and instead of
thinking about power management and efficiency the absence of APIs
such as discussed provokes not only creating the power management
inefficient code, but also memory leaks here and there.

--
With Best Regards,
Andy Shevchenko