Re: Driver core support for early platform devices

[Greg KH <gregkh@suse.de>]

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 11:55:56AM -0600, Moffett, Kyle D wrote:
> On Dec 22, 2011, at 12:45, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 11:15:06AM -0600, Moffett, Kyle D wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >> 
> >> I'm tinkering with some improvements to the way that OpenPIC/MPIC are
> >> detected and loaded on PowerPC platforms, and it seems like I am trying
> >> to use the driver model before it is fully initialized.
> >> 
> >> In particular, it seems like it should be possible to simply declare an
> >> OpenPIC in the device-tree and have it automatically bound to a platform
> >> driver declaring the right OpenFirmware match strings.
> >> 
> >> Unfortunately, it needs to be bound by init_IRQ() time, while the driver
> >> model does not get initialized until much later (after the scheduler is
> >> up and running).
> >> 
> >> As far as I can tell, there seem to be 2 possible approaches to making
> >> that possible:
> >> 
> >> (1) Split the driver-model initialization into "early" and "late" phases
> >>    so that drivers can be registered and devices probed very early on
> >>    and then replay the necessary scheduler-dependent things after the
> >>    system is mostly started up (IE: devtmpfs, etc).
> > 
> > We already have that today with the "early_platform*" functions, right?
> > Will those work for you, or do you need this for a bus you are creating
> > and not using the platform bus?
> 
> Well, I can't figure out how "early_platform" is actually supposed to
> integrate with the platform bus itself.  It seems designed mostly for
> drivers like "earlyprintk" et. al. for which loading is controlled by
> a kernel parameter.
> 
> Specifically, I don't see any "early_platform" logic to match devices in
> the OF device-tree based on the driver "of_match" parameters, just based
> on text strings in early_param().
> 
> Furthermore, if I register an "early_platform" device, it seems to get
> unregistered when the normal driver model is brought up, instead of
> being sucked in and promoted to a normal platform_device.  That code is
> pretty poorly documented and only used in a couple places right now,
> though, so it's possible I am misreading it.

I think Magnus wrote this code, as he was having the same issues you
were, so he should be able to answer these questions better than I, as I
do not know this code at all, sorry.

greg k-h