[RFC PATCH v2 0/7] of: Introduce hardware prober driver

[Doug Anderson]

Hi,

On Thu, Nov 9, 2023 at 5:52 AM Rob Herring <robh+dt at kernel.org> wrote:
>
> > > End of background from Doug's cover letter.
> >
> > I think that using "status" is not a good idea, I find that confusing.
>
> "status" is what defines a device's state in terms of enabled,
> present, available. That's exactly what we're expressing here.
>
> Now, I do not think we should be mixing the device class (e.g.
> touchscreen) into status. I said this on v1, but apparently that was
> not listened to.

Interesting. I must have missed the "don't mix device class into
status" part. Do you have a link to your post about that? Maybe
there's other stuff I missed... Having the device class stuck at the
end there was at least part of my last post [1] which gathered no
response.

I think one of the reasons that I felt we needed to mux the device
class into status was that it was going to make the code a lot less
fragile. Everything I've seen indicates that you don't want us to
create a "HW prober" node that could be used to provide relevant
phandles for different classes of devices, so the "HW prober" code
needs to either search through the whole device tree for a status of
"failed-needs-probe" or needs to contain per-board, hardcoded,
fully-qualified paths.

I don't think we want to include hardcoded, fully-qualified paths in
the code. That would mean that if someone changed a node name
somewhere in the path to one of the devices that we're dealing with
then it would break.

So if we're searching the whole device tree for "failed-needs-probe"
then we need to figure out which devices are related to each other. If
a given board has second sources for MIPI panels, touchscreens, and
trackpads then we need to know which of the "failed-needs-probe"
devices are trackpads, which are touchscreens, and which are MIPI
panels. Do you have any suggestions for how we should do that? Maybe
it was in some other thread that I missed? I guess we could have a
board-specific table mapping (compatible + node name + reg) to a
class, but that feels awkward.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/r/CAD=FV=UjVAgT-febtj4=UZ2GQp01D-ern2Ff9+ODcHeQBOsdTQ@mail.gmail.com