[PATCH RFC PoC 0/2] platform: different approach to early platform drivers

[David Lechner]

On 04/26/2018 12:31 PM, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 05:29:18PM +0200, Bartosz Golaszewski wrote:
>> From: Bartosz Golaszewski <bgolaszewski at baylibre.com>
>>
>> This is a follow to my series[1] the aim of which was to introduce device tree
>> support for early platform devices.
>>
>> It was received rather negatively. Aside from using device tree to pass
>> implementation specific details to the system, two important concerns were
>> raised: no probe deferral support and the fact that currently the early devices
>> never get converted to actual platform drivers. This series is a
>> proof-of-concept that's trying to address those issues.
>>
>> The only user of the current version of early platform drivers is the SuperH
>> architecture. If this series eventually gets merged, we could simply replace
>> the other solution.
> 
> Looking at a quick output of:
> 
> 	grep -r -A10 early_devices[[] arch/sh/kernel/
> 
> it looks like all of the existing early platform devices are serial
> ports, clocks, and clocksources. The switch to device tree should pick
> them all up from CLK_OF_DECLARE, TIMER_OF_DECLARE, and
> EARLYCON_DECLARE. Until that's complete, the existing code works
> as-is. I don't see what problem you're trying to solve.

The problem for us is that clk maintainers don't want new drivers to use
CLK_OF_DECLARE and instead use platform devices. I have just written such
a new driver that is shared by 6 different SoCs. For some combinations of
SoCs and clocks, using a platform device is fine but on others we need to
register early, so the drivers now have to handle both cases, which is
kind of messy and fragile. If there is a generic way to register platform
devices early, then the code is simplified because we only have to handle
one method of registering the clocks instead of two.

> 
> FYI I'm (sometimes-somewhat-absent) arch/sh co-maintainer.
> 
> Rich
>