Hello,
lately I've been trying to make the Himax HX8837 chip that drives the OLPC LCD display work with Armada DRM driver. I've been advised to create a bridge driver and not an encoder driver since the silicon is separate from the LCDC.
The Armada DRM driver (and, I think, the i.MX one) creates the drm_device once the component infrastructure sees the necessary sub-devices appear. The sub-devices being the LCDCs and the encoders (not bridges) that it expects to be created externally.
Currently, it seems, the only driver that can actually work with this (that is -- creates a drm_encoder for a drm_device when the component is bound) is the tda998x. All other similar drivers create a drm_bridge instead and not use the component infrastructure at all. (In fact, tilcdc driver contains a hack to handle tda998x specially.)
I'm wondering how to reconcile the two?
* The tda998x driver has recently been modified to create a bridge on probe and eventually encoder on component bind. Is this an okay thing to do in a new driver? (this probably means the tilcdc hack can be removed...)
* If a non-componentized bridge were to be used (along with a dummy encoder), at what point would it make sense to look for the bridge? Would it be a good idea to defer the probe of crtc until a bridge can be looked up and the attach it on component bind? What if the bridge goes away (a module is unloaded, etc.) in between?
I'd be thankful for opintions and advice before I move ahead with this.
Thanks, Lubo