[GIT PULL] ARM: SoC fixes for v5.10, part 3

[Doug Anderson]

Hi,

On Mon, Dec 7, 2020 at 1:55 PM Arnd Bergmann <arnd at kernel.org> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Dec 7, 2020 at 9:23 PM Geert Uytterhoeven <geert at linux-m68k.org> wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 1, 2020 at 3:06 PM Arnd Bergmann <arnd at kernel.org> wrote:
> > > On Tue, Dec 1, 2020 at 12:39 PM Ulf Hansson <ulf.hansson at linaro.org> wrote:
> > > > So, I think we have two options. If people are willing to move to
> > > > "disk labels" or to patch their DTBs with mmc aliases, things can stay
> > > > as is. Otherwise, we can revert the async probe parts of the mmc host
> > > > drivers, but that would still leave us in a fragile situation.
> > >
> > > Can you reliably detect whether the mmc aliases in the dt exist?
> > > If that's possible, maybe the async flag could be masked out to only have
> > > an effect when the device number is known.
> >
> > IMHO DT aliases are not a proper solution for this.
> >
> > Yes, you can detect reliably if an alias exists in the DT.
> > The problems start when having multiple devices, some with aliases,
> > some without.  And when devices can appear dynamically (without
> > aliases, as there is no support for dynamically updating the aliases
> > list).
>
> Actually you hit a problem earlier than that: the async probe is a
> property of the host controller driver, which may be a pci_driver,
> platform_driver, usb_driver, or anything else really. To figure out
> whether to probe it asynchronously, it would have to be the driver
> core, or each bus type that can host these to understand which
> device driver is responsible for probing an eMMC device attached
> to the host.

>From what I've seen so far, my current thought on this issue is that
it's up to Ulf as the MMC maintainer what the next steps are.  For me,
at least, his argument that MMC block numbers have already shuffled
around several times in the last several years is at least some
evidence that they weren't exactly stable to begin with.  While we
could go back to the numbers that happened to be chosen as of kernel
v5.9, if someone was updating from a much older kernel then they may
have different expectations of what numbers are good / bad I think.

I will also offer one possible suggestion: what about a KConfig option
here?  In theory we could add a KConfig option like
"CONFIG_MMC_LEGACY_PROBE" or something that.  One can argue about what
the default ought to be, but maybe that would satisfy folks?  If you
were happy giving up a little bit of boot speed to get the v5.9 block
numbers then you could set this.


-Doug