Re: [PATCH 1/3] x86: enable common clk on x86

[Mika Westerberg <mika.westerberg@linux.intel.com>]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 04:01:20PM +0100, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> On Wednesday, January 16, 2013 07:20:54 AM Mika Westerberg wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 12:59:17AM +0100, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > > On Monday, January 14, 2013 04:46:26 PM Mika Westerberg wrote:
> > > > We are starting to see traditional SoC peripherals also in the x86 world,
> > > > things like UART, I2C and SPI controllers that might already have a working
> > > > device driver. These drivers typically take advantage of the Linux clk
> > > > framework to control and retrieve information about the peripheral clock.
> > > > 
> > > > There hasn't been a standard way on x86 to pass the clock rate from
> > > > whatever configuration system is used to the driver, but instead different
> > > > variations have emerged, like adding this information to the platform data.
> > > > 
> > > > In order to use the standard Linux way we enable the common clk subsystem
> > > > also on x86. This allows us to re-use the drivers with little or no
> > > > modification wrt. clock API usage.
> > > > 
> > > > This patch was originally proposed by Mark Brown.
> > > 
> > > Are there any side effects of selecting COMMON_CLK by an arch and if so then
> > > what are they?
> > 
> > Selecting COMMON_CLK also selects HAVE_CLK, so drivers that are dependent
> > on that option become available when you run make config.
> 
> Well, that's not very nice.  Do you know how many of them there are?

There are few. I tried how many I get on my config and there were 9 new
questions with 'make oldconfig'.

Grepping (if I did it correctly) reveals:

% git grep 'depends .*HAVE_CLK' -- '*/Kconfig' | wc -l
27

> Distros often build all drivers available regardless of whether or not they
> are going to be used and it would be kind of wasteful for them to build drivers
> that aren't even going to work.

If a driver depends only on HAVE_CLK and doesn't work everywhere, there is
a problem in that particular driver and its Kconfig options (some
dependencies are missing). These drivers should be fixed.