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

[Rich Felker]

On Fri, Apr 27, 2018 at 02:40:34PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 27, 2018 at 1:53 PM, Bartosz Golaszewski <brgl at bgdev.pl> wrote:
> > 2018-04-27 12:18 GMT+02:00 Arnd Bergmann <arnd at arndb.de>:
> >> On Fri, Apr 27, 2018 at 10:57 AM, Bartosz Golaszewski
> >> <bgolaszewski at baylibre.com> wrote:
> >>> 2018-04-27 9:52 GMT+02:00 Arnd Bergmann <arnd at arndb.de>:
> >>>> On Fri, Apr 27, 2018 at 4:28 AM, David Lechner <david at lechnology.com> wrote:
> >>> My patch tries to address exactly the use cases we're facing - for
> >>> example by providing means to probe devices twice (early and late) and
> >>> to check the state we're at in order for users to be able to just do
> >>> the critical initialization early on and then continue with regular
> >>> stuff later.
> >>
> >> Maybe the problem is reusing the name and some of the code from
> >> an existing functionality that we've been trying to get rid of.
> >>
> >
> > I'm not reusing the name - in fact I set the prefix to earlydev_
> > exactly in order to not confuse anyone. I'm also not reusing any code
> > in the second series.
> 
> Ok.
> 
> >> If what you want to do is completely different from the existing
> >> early_platform implementation, how about starting by moving that
> >> out of drivers/base/platform.c into something under arch/sh/
> >> and renaming it to something with an sh_ prefix.
> >>
> >
> > Yes, this is a good idea, but what about the sh-specific drivers that
> > rely on it? Is including headers from arch/ in driver code still an
> > accepted practice?
> 
> I think it's fine here, since we're just move it out of the way and
> there are only very few drivers using it:
> 
> drivers/clocksource/sh_cmt.c:early_platform_init("earlytimer",
> &sh_cmt_device_driver);
> drivers/clocksource/sh_mtu2.c:early_platform_init("earlytimer",
> &sh_mtu2_device_driver);
> drivers/clocksource/sh_tmu.c:early_platform_init("earlytimer",
> &sh_tmu_device_driver);
> drivers/clocksource/timer-ti-dm.c:early_platform_init("earlytimer",
> &omap_dm_timer_driver);
> drivers/tty/serial/sh-sci.c:early_platform_init_buffer("earlyprintk",
> &sci_driver,
> 
> For timer-ti-dm, it seems like a leftover from old times that can
> be removed. The other four are shared between arch/sh and
> arch/arm/mach-shmobile and already have some #ifdef
> to handle those two cases.

FWIW if arch/sh is the only remaining user of the earlyprintk part,
please don't go to any trouble to preserve it. I want to move to
earlycon exclusively. Not sure if that is possible before moving the
boards that are using it to device tree; if so and it's easy, please
consider sending a patch or a sketch of what it should look like so I
can do it.

Rich