[PATCH v4 0/22] On-demand device probing

[Rob Herring]

On Mon, Sep 7, 2015 at 7:23 AM, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu.vizoso at collabora.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have a problem with the panel on my Tegra Chromebook taking longer
> than expected to be ready during boot (Stéphane Marchesin reported what
> is basically the same issue in [0]), and have looked into ordered
> probing as a better way of solving this than moving nodes around in the
> DT or playing with initcall levels and linking order.
>
> While reading the thread [1] that Alexander Holler started with his
> series to make probing order deterministic, it occurred to me that it
> should be possible to achieve the same by probing devices as they are
> referenced by other devices.
>
> This basically reuses the information that is already implicit in the
> probe() implementations, saving us from refactoring existing drivers or
> adding information to DTBs.
>
> During review of v1 of this series Linus Walleij suggested that it
> should be the device driver core to make sure that dependencies are
> ready before probing a device. I gave this idea a try [2] but Mark Brown
> pointed out to the logic duplication between the resource acquisition
> and dependency discovery code paths (though I think it's fairly minor).
>
> To address that code duplication I experimented with Arnd's devm_probe
> [3] concept of having drivers declare their dependencies instead of
> acquiring them during probe, and while it worked [4], I don't think we
> end up winning anything when compared to just probing devices on-demand
> from resource getters.
>
> One remaining objection is to the "sprinkling" of calls to
> of_device_probe() in the resource getters of each subsystem, but I think
> it's the right thing to do given that the storage of resources is
> currently subsystem-specific.
>
> We could avoid the above by moving resource storage into the core, but I
> don't think there's a compelling case for that.
>
> I have tested this on boards with Tegra, iMX.6, Exynos, Rockchip and
> OMAP SoCs, and these patches were enough to eliminate all the deferred
> probes (except one in PandaBoard because omap_dma_system doesn't have a
> firmware node as of yet).
>
> Have submitted a branch [5] with only these patches on top of thursday's
> linux-next to kernelci.org and I don't see any issues that could be
> caused by them. For some reason it currently has more passes than the
> version of -next it's based on!
>
> With this series I get the kernel to output to the panel in 0.5s,
> instead of 2.8s.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
> [0] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2014-August/066527.html
>
> [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/5/12/452
>
> [2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/6/17/305
>
> [3] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ports.arm.kernel/277689
>
> [4] https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/7/21/441a
>
> [5] https://git.collabora.com/cgit/user/tomeu/linux.git/log/?h=on-demand-probes-v6
>
> [6] http://kernelci.org/boot/all/job/collabora/kernel/v4.2-11902-g25d80c927f8b/
>
> [7] http://kernelci.org/boot/all/job/next/kernel/next-20150903/
>
> Changes in v4:
> - Added bus.pre_probe callback so the probes of Primecell devices can be
>   deferred if their device IDs cannot be yet read because of the clock
>   driver not having probed when they are registered. Maybe this goes
>   overboard and the matching information should be in the DT if there is
>   one.

Seems overboard to me or at least a separate problem. Most clocks have
to be setup before the driver model simply because timers depend on
clocks usually.

Rob