[RFC PATCH 2/5] clk: Introduce 'clk_round_rate_nearest()'

[Sören Brinkmann]

On Wed, 2014-05-21 at 09:34AM +0200, Uwe Kleine-König wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 02:48:20PM -0700, Sören Brinkmann wrote:
> > On Tue, 2014-05-20 at 10:48AM -0700, Stephen Boyd wrote:
> > > On 05/20/14 09:01, Sören Brinkmann wrote:
> > > >
> > > >>>>> +{
> > > >>>>> +	unsigned long lower, upper, cur, lower_last, upper_last;
> > > >>>>> +
> > > >>>>> +	lower = clk_round_rate(clk, rate);
> > > >>>>> +	if (lower >= rate)
> > > >>>>> +		return lower;
> > > >>>> Is the >-case worth a warning?
> > > >>> No, it's correct behavior. If you request a rate that is way lower than what the
> > > >>> clock can generate, returning something larger is perfectly valid, IMHO.
> > > >>> Which reveals one problem in this whole discussion. The API does not
> > > >>> require clk_round_rate() to round down. It is actually an implementation
> > > >>> choice that had been made for clk-divider.
> > > >> I'm sure it's more than an implementation choice for clk-divider. But I
> > > >> don't find any respective documentation (but I didn't try hard).
> > > > A similar discussion - without final conclusion:
> > > > https://lkml.org/lkml/2010/7/14/260
> > > >
> > > >
> > > 
> > > Please call this new API something like clk_find_nearest_rate() or
> > > something. clk_round_rate() is supposed to return the rate that will be
> > > set if you call clk_set_rate() with the same arguments. It's up to the
> > > implementation to decide if that means rounding the rate up or down or
> > > to the nearest value.
> > 
> > Sounds good to me. Are there any cases of clocks that round up? I think
> > that case would not be handled correctly. But I also don't see a use
> > case for such an implementation.
> I don't really care which semantic (i.e. round up, round down or round
> closest) is picked, but I'd vote that all should pick up the same. I
> think the least surprising definition is to choose rounding down and add
> the function that is under discussion here to get a nearest match.
> 
> So I suggest:
> 
> 	- if round_rate is given a rate that is smaller than the
> 	  smallest available rate, return 0
> 	- add WARN_ONCE to round_rate and set_rate if they return with a
> 	  rate bigger than requested

Why do you think 0 is always valid? I think for a clock that can
generate 40, 70, 120, clk_round_rate(20) should return 40.

> 	- change the return values to unsigned long

Yep, I agree, this should happen.

	Sören