Re: [PATCH v7 5/7] media: i2c: add DS90UB960 driver

From: Tomi Valkeinen
Date: Fri Jan 27 2023 - 03:24:16 EST

On 26/01/2023 12:51, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
On Thu, Jan 26, 2023 at 12:21:06PM +0200, Andy Shevchenko wrote:
On Thu, Jan 26, 2023 at 10:41:47AM +0200, Tomi Valkeinen wrote:
On 25/01/2023 17:27, Andy Shevchenko wrote:

...

But I probably don't understand the ATR structure and what exactly we need to
pass to it, perhaps it also can be replaced with properties (note, that we have
some interesting ones that called references, which is an alternative to DT
phandle).

Well, maybe this needs a Linux bus implementation. I'm not that familiar
with implementing a bus, but I think that would make it easier to share data
between the deserializer and the serializer. A bus sounds a bit like an
overkill for a 1-to-1 connection, used by a few drivers, but maybe it
wouldn't be too much code.

Have you looked at auxiliary bus (appeared a few releases ago in kernel)?

As far as I understand, the auxiliary bus infrastructure is meant for
use cases where a single hardware device needs to be split into multiple
logical devices (as in struct device). Platform devices were
historically (ab)used for this, and the auxiliary bus is meant as a
cleaner solution. I'm not sure if it would be a good match here, or if
it would be considered an abuse of the auxiliary bus API.

The aux bus docs say "A key requirement for utilizing the auxiliary bus is that there is no dependency on a physical bus, device, register accesses or regmap support. These individual devices split from the core cannot live on the platform bus as they are not physical devices that are controlled by DT/ACPI.", which doesn't sound like a good fit.

The deserializer and serializers are currently independent devices and drivers (the pdata is the only shared thing), but I think we may need something better here. The devices are more tightly tied together than "normal" video devices, in my opinion, as the serializer is fully controlled by the deserializer (including power).

And if we ever want to implement something like power management, we probably need something more than what we have now. Although I don't know how that would be done, as all the peripherals behind the serializer would also lose power...

Tomi