[PATCH 5/6] clk: Support multiple instances of the same clock provider

[Russell King - ARM Linux]

On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 07:53:45PM +0900, Mark Brown wrote:
> We do need some way to have some idea which clocks we're talking about,
> and for off-SoC stuff passing around struct clk pointers is rather
> painful.  At some point some bit of code is going to have to get hold of
> the actual struct clk and then map it onto the devices using it.

As I haven't seen any of this "passing around struct clk pointers" crap
recently, I can only guess at what you're saying.  I thought all that
had been solved with _proper_ use of clkdev.

clkdev can provide you with a struct clk for _any_ device in the system
where its name is known at build time.

For devices where the name is not known at build time, a new cl_lookup
entry can be created at runtime with clkdev_alloc() or clk_add_alias(),
and dropped with clkdev_drop().

The problem comes when you aren't able to hook into a subsystem which
creates an unstable device name (eg, USB).  I suspect that's also a
problem for DT too because there has to be some way to go from a struct
device to something stable.