[PATCH RFC] clk: add support for automatic parent handling

[Thomas Gleixner]

On Fri, 29 Apr 2011, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 09:52:15PM +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> > On Wed, 20 Apr 2011, Uwe Kleine-König wrote:
> > > struct clk has no parent member, there is only clk_get_parent(). If
> > 
> > Which is a complete failure to begin with. Why the heck do you need a
> > callback to figure that out?
> 
> Thomas, you're wrong.  You're looking at things far too simply, because
> all you can see is a tree of clocks.

And that's what it is. Even if the clock can have sevaral possible
parents, then there is only one active parent at a time. It's still a
tree.
 
> When you have MUXes, a clock can have one of many parents.  So a single
> clk->parent doesn't hack it.  That's one reason why clk_get_parent()
> exists, so that MUXes can return the appropriate parent for the current
> MUX setting.

That's only ever needed when you register a clk with the framework to
decode the current setting from the hardware.
 
> You may wish to store the current setting in clk->parent, but I'd argue
> that's a recipe for things going wrong when the MUX settings differ from
> the cached clk->parent value.  Instead, having clk_get_parent()s
> implementation return the _current_ parent and let MUXes do the right
> thing depending on hardware is much easier and more reliably correct.

If something changes the clk parent in the hardware without going
through common framework functions, which take care of updating
clk->parent in the proper way, then the implementer got it wrong
badly. That's the same thing as if you change the clock rate of your
timekeeping clock behind the timekeeping core and then complain about
timekeeping going awry.

Thanks,

	tglx