[RFC PATCH 1/3] dt-bindings: pinctrl: sunxi: document new generic binding

[Maxime Ripard]

On Fri, Nov 24, 2017 at 05:19:24PM +0000, Andre Przywara wrote:
> > This is not the same as saying we need to be able to fully validate all
> > aspects of device tree. We can't, because some information simply does
> > not exist outside of DT. However, I think it's a big mistake to trust a
> > user to fully know about all intricacies of a pinmux and not make any
> > mistake when writing the device tree.
> 
> When does a *user* write a device tree? What would a clueless Joe
> Average expect from doing so? The device tree is written by either the
> board/SoC vendor or by some kernel developers. It is not meant to be
> changed by the user, apart from carefully crafted overlays, maybe. You
> can have the same control by just changing the kernel (binary patching
> the image file or re-compiling with
> writel(MATCHES, base_addr + SET_FIRE)).

I guess the expectation should be that it's a Joe Average user in the
Allwinner case at least. It's far from the exception that someone that
never got any kernel (or electronics) experience before jumps in,
creates a DT for the shiny new board they just received and then
submits it.

I guess it's more the case in the Allwinner case than for any other
SoCs I've worked on at least, probably because of its widespread use
in the low-end consumer market and their reputation amongst hackers,
but still, this is basically our default.

> > What if one of the settings causes the board to go up in flames?
> 
> Then you better not play with it. But I don't think this is a valid
> argument, really. What if gravity reverses tomorrow?
> Are there any known issues with writing mux values to pinctrl registers?
> I don't think the consequences would be different from putting low or
> high to a GPIO, which you can do already from userland.

I guess the difference would be that's it's active in your example,
while the pinmux will be set even if a user doesn't do anything. And I
can testify that you can very well permanently fry a board passively
using pinctrl :)

> > And let's face it: the really difficult part of adding pinmux support is
> > to write the driver (or subsystem if you don't have one yet). Adding the
> > data is really the easy part.
> 
> I know, I did this before. But currently you have to write both the DT
> part *and* the kernel table. And check patch 3/3, that's what the table
> gets reduced to. So you avoid writing 601 lines, instead add 23 lines to
> the DT.

And I'll just add here that if the data size is of concern, as it can
be in a bootloader, you can very well have partial tables. There's
plenty of devices that will be of no use in a bootloader.

Maxime

-- 
Maxime Ripard, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
http://free-electrons.com
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