Am 10.06.2015 um 09:30 schrieb Linus Walleij:
On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 12:14 PM, Tomeu Vizoso tomeu.vizoso@collabora.com wrote:
On 2 June 2015 at 10:48, Linus Walleij linus.walleij@linaro.org wrote:
This is what systemd is doing in userspace for starting services: ask for your dependencies and wait for them if they are not there. So drivers ask for resources and wait for them. It also needs to be abstract, so for example we need to be able to hang on regulator_get() until the driver is up and providing that regulator, and as long as everything is in slowpath it should be OK. (And vice versa mutatis mutandis for clk, gpio, pin control, interrupts (!) and DMA channels for example.)
I understood above that you propose probing devices in order, but now you mention that resource getters would block until the dependency is fulfilled which confuses me because if we are probing in order then all dependencies would be fulfilled before the device in question gets probed.
Sorry, the problem space is a bit convoluted so the answers get a bit convoluted. Maybe I'm thinking aloud and altering the course of my thoughts as I type...
I guess there can be explicit dependencies for resources like this patch does, but another way would be for all resource fetch functions to be instrumented, so that you do not block until you try to take a resource that is not yet there, e.g.:
regulator_get(...) -> not available, so:
- identify target regulator provider - this will need instrumentation
- probe it
It then turns out the regulator driver is on the i2c bus, so we need to probe the i2c driver:
- identify target i2c host for the regulator driver - this will need instrumentation
- probe the i2c host driver
i2c host comes out, probes the regulator driver, regulator driver probes and then the regulator_get() call returns.
This requires instrumentation on anything providing a resource to another driver like those I mentioned and a lot of overhead infrastructure, but I think it's the right approach. However I don't know if I would ever be able to pull that off myself, I know talk is cheap and I should show the code instead.
You would end up with the same problem of deadlocks as currently, and you would still need something ugly like the defered probe brutforce to avoid them. So what would you win with that instrumentation?
Alexander Holler