[PATCH 02/17] ARM: at91: use machine specific hook for late init

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Saturday 28 April 2012, Shawn Guo wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 28, 2012 at 07:30:01AM +0200, Jean-Christophe PLAGNIOL-VILLARD wrote:
> > On 10:30 Sat 28 Apr     , Shawn Guo wrote:
> > > On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 04:26:01PM +0200, Jean-Christophe PLAGNIOL-VILLARD wrote:
> > > > we discuss with Arnd we came back with 2 ideas one is to use a machine
> > > > specific initcall or compatible specifc initcall
> > > 
> > > Do you mean an initcall with machine/compatible detection inside?  The
> > > whole point of the hooks in struct machine_desc  is to save the
> > > machine/compatible detection.  You already use .init_machine as
> > > an arch_initcall time hook, and what .init_late provides you is just
> > > a late_initcall time hook.  If you want to detect machine/compatible
> > > in your late_initcall rather than using this hook, you should not
> > > use .init_machine for the same reason.
> > on DT we just do this
> > 
> I'm talking about non-DT case.  Sadly, there are still so many non-DT
> board files in arch/arm/mach-at91.

It depends on whether we want to allow non-DT board files for multiplatform
kernels. We clearly can allow them, but I think we can spare some trouble
and also make the configuration simpler if we just disallow it, and
make only those platforms that are converted to both allow multiplat
and DT boot as sub-options under the top-level multiplatform kernel
option. If we do that, we can keep a lot of initcalls in the platform
code and just add an "if (!of_have_populated_dt())" in them or a check
for the respective device.

> > so the hook start to make not too much sense
> > at machine level
> > 
> > as this is for nearly all of them purely soc
> > 
> This reminds me an argument against soc_desc stuff.  With DT adopted,
> the struct machine_desc (hooks inside it) becomes purely soc specific,
> so why do we need soc_desc then?

Ah, good point. I was wondering what happened to that discussion.

On a related note, I have looked up what kinds of initcalls are in
the platform code:

$ git grep -h ^[a-z_]*_initcall arch/arm/ | cut -f 1 -d \( | sort | uniq -c | sort -n      1 subsys_initcall_sync
      2 postcore_initcall_sync
      5 console_initcall
      7 fs_initcall
      9 early_initcall
     14 __initcall
     34 device_initcall
     35 postcore_initcall
     43 core_initcall
     49 late_initcall
     87 subsys_initcall
    128 arch_initcall

I think that if we do the late_initcall mechanism that you proposed,
we will probaly need the same for subsyste_initcall, and although
we already have mach_desc->init_machine() at the arch_initcall
level, it seems that there are a lot of other users that don't
use it (for good or for not so good reasons, I have not checked)
and that would definitely benefit from the method that Jean-Christophe
posted. I think we will end up wanting both in any case.

	Arnd