[PATCH v5, 00/15] Using component framework to support multi hardware decode

[Ezequiel Garcia]

On Thu, 19 Aug 2021 at 04:13, yunfei.dong at mediatek.com
<yunfei.dong at mediatek.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Ezequiel,
>
> Thanks for your suggestion.
>
> On Wed, 2021-08-18 at 11:11 -0300, Ezequiel Garcia wrote:
> > +danvet
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > On Tue, 10 Aug 2021 at 23:58, Yunfei Dong <yunfei.dong at mediatek.com>
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > This series adds support for multi hardware decode into mtk-vcodec,
> > > by first
> > > adding component framework to manage each hardware information:
> > > interrupt,
> > > clock, register bases and power. Secondly add core thread to deal
> > > with core
> > > hardware message, at the same time, add msg queue for different
> > > hardware
> > > share messages. Lastly, the architecture of different specs are not
> > > the same,
> > > using specs type to separate them.
> > >
> >
> > I don't think it's a good idea to introduce the component API in the
> > media subsystem. It doesn't seem to be maintained, IRC there's not
> > even
> > a maintainer for it, and it has some issues that were never
> > addressed.
> >
> > It would be really important to avoid it. Is it really needed in the
> > first place?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Ezequiel
>
> For there are many hardware need to use, mt8192 is three and mt8195 is
> five. Maybe need more to be used in the feature.
>
> Each hardware has independent clk/power/iommu port/irq.
> Use component interface in prob to get each component's information.
> Just enable the hardware when need to use it, very convenient and
> simple.
>
> I found that there are many modules use component to manage hardware
> information, such as iommu and drm etc.
>

Many drivers support multiple hardware variants, where each variant
has a different number of clocks or interrupts, see for instance
struct hantro_variant which allows to expose different codec cores,
some having both decoder/encoder, and some having just a decoder.

The component API is mostly used by DRM to aggregate independent
subdevices (called components) into an aggregated driver.

For instance, a DRM driver needs to glue together the HDMI, MIPI,
and plany controller, or any other hardware arrangement where
devices can be described independently.

The component API may look simple but has some issues, it's not easy
to debug, and can cause troubles if not used as expected [1].
It's worth making sure you actually need a framework
to glue different devices together.

> Do you have any other suggestion for this architecture?
>

Looking at the different patchsets that are posted, it's not clear
to me what exactly are the different architectures that you intend
to support, can you some documentation which clarifies that?

Thanks,
Ezequiel

[1] https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-rockchip/cover/20200120170602.3832-1-ezequiel@collabora.com/