[PATCH RFC] clk: add support for automatic parent handling

[torbenh@gmx.de (torbenh)]

On Mon, May 02, 2011 at 11:35:25PM -0700, Colin Cross wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 7:27 AM, torbenh <torbenh@gmx.de> wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 02:26:13PM +0100, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> >> On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 02:13:06PM +0200, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> >> > This are all well defined semantical problems and should be solved in
> >> > common code rather than having different buggy implementations in each
> >> > SoC clock "framework".
> >>
> >> Why are you associating functional elements in drivers/clk with the
> >> SoC clock framework?
> >
> > i think i pretty much understand what thomas is after. but i have
> > problems understanding, what you want here.
> >
> > until this point, it looks like you only want the driver/clk to
> > model the clock endpoints inside the devices. A device itself shouldnt
> > be caring for clock parents or anything. its only concern is that a
> > clock pin is fed with the right frequency, or off...
> >
> >>
> >> I think that's the root cause of this misunderstanding, and until you
> >> start realising that these building blocks are not part of the SoC
> >> implementation, we're going to continue arguing about this.
> >
> > what you say now, pretty much sounds like what thomas wants.
> > these building blocks would be objects derived from the clock baseclass,
> > which thomas is trying to define. he doesnt seem to be concerned about
> > the second more special layer yet.
> >
> > i am quite puzzled, what exactly your fighting over :S
> 
> Thomas wants a core framework that handles the clock tree, with each
> clock being the implementation of just the clock.  Russell thinks this
> is impossible, and wants to stop at implementing building blocks for
> the standard clock types, and let each SoC put them into a tree.

Thomas wants the clocks to reference a clock_chip.
(much like genirq... you have irq_desc and and irq_chip)
so there is still one component which has the "big picture"
and can implement crazy platform rules, if necessary.
> 
> I don't think anybody can argue that a shared clock tree framework, if
> it was possible to do well, would be a benefit.  But there are a few
> problems that make abstracting the differences between SoCs very hard
> at that level.
> 
> After implementing the Tegra clock tree at least 10 times to solve
> different problems, there are two very hard problems to solve.
> 
> First is locking.  Per-clock locking is hard because it requires
> choosing up front which way locking will go, usually locking the
> child, then locking the parent, then enabling the parent, and enabling
> the child.  Any operation flow that requires traversing the tree from
> the parent to the child, for example changing the rate of the parent,
> causes lock inversion.  Global locking is easy, but can be wasteful on
> platforms that have some very slow clocks (think external i2c clocks),
> and some very fast clocks (internal register writes).  This is
> mitigated by the separation of clk_prepare and clk_enable locking -
> clk_enable can never sleep, so it can't be blocked for long.  Locking
> at the root node of the tree would be nice, but most SoCs don't have a
> root node - they have a fast root clock and a slow root clock, and can
> switch the all or most of clock tree over to the slow clock in some
> modes.

yeah. one of the big reasons, why the generic code should do the
locking. 
> 
> The second problem is rate changing.  Different platforms require
> wildly different strategies for changing clock rates.  On Tegra,
> clk_set_rate will never change the parent, because we can generally
> set up the parent clocks to the correct frequencies for all the
> devices, and then device drivers can change their dividers to get the
> rate they need.  The few cases where the parent needs to change
> (cpufreq and display pclk), the driver manually calls clk_set_parent.
> On other platforms, it is common to need to change the parent to get
> the necessary rate.
> 
> Automatically selecting parents in a generic way is impossible.  If
> one DEV1 calls clk_set_rate and clk_enable, and the core framework
> responds by setting pll A to frequency X, and setting the parent of
> DEV1 to A, what happens when DEV2 calls clk_set_rate to a frequency
> that can only be satisfied by setting pll A to frequency Y?  DEV1
> can't be switched to another pll, because it is already enabled, and
> some platforms can't support glitchlessly changing a mux, even if the
> frequency doesn't change.

in the case where we cant change a parent clock, the generic code could
just fail to set_rate. then delegate the problem to the clk_chip which
can resolve the problem.
the locking would be tricky, but it is solvable.
but its still somthing we only want implemented once.

so how does changing a mux, which glitches, work now ?
do the child clocked devices need to be turned off/notified when this
happens ?

> 
> I still think a common implementation of the clock tree framework
> would be useful, even if not all platforms can use it.  Allow the
> platforms that can to use it, providing only clock data, and maybe a
> few clock implementations if the building blocks are not sufficient,
> and allow those that can't to implement their own versions of the
> clk_* functions on top of the clock building blocks.  Tegra already
> has a fairly generic implementation of a clock tree in
> arch/arm/mach-tegra/clock.c, moving it to the common clk struct and
> sharing it with other platforms wouldn't be any extra code, even if no
> other platforms could use it.  And I bet at least OMAP could use it,
> from what I've seen.
> 
> Per-tree locking is a solvable problem, as long as a tree was
> considered as an ordered graph - two root nodes that feed into the
> same clocks would be considered part of the same tree.  The core
> framework could look at all possible parents of a clock to determine
> what clock trees were truly independent, which would result in a
> single global lock on most platforms, but multiple locks on platforms
> that really had independent clock trees.  Dynamically added clocks
> would cause problems with this solution.
> 
> I think automatic clock parent and rate setting would need to be
> delegated to a platform-specific layer, and I'm not sure how.  Maybe
> allow platforms to override the set_rate ops in the clock tree
> building blocks, or a new op that can determine the new tree
> structure, and call the old set_rate op to set the registers.

yeah, getting these constraints solved automatically is pretty
expensive. some heuristics are probably indicated here.

-- 
torben Hohn