Re: [RFC,v2 3/6] media: dt-bindings: add DS90UB954-Q1 video deserializer

[Wolfram Sang <wsa@the-dreams.de>]

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> Not if you define enough addresses in the pool. E.g. the DS90UB954
> hardware can have 8 aliases per port, so if you have (n_ports * 8)
> addresses in the pool the problem is solved.

And then you plug-in somewhere another board with another need for ATR
and you are out of addresses.

> > And another add-on module with
> > non-repogrammable devices may occupy addresses from the defined pool
> > above.
> 
> You mean a new device on the local (SoC-to-ATR) bus? Well, it could as
> well occupy a non-described address that the ATR has already picked as
> an alias.

Nope, I mean a seperate add-on which has a hardcoded I2C address on the
bus of the ATR parent. Then this hardcoded address needs to be removed
from the pool if it is in the wrong range.

> > I am not perfectly happy with the assumption that all undescribed
> > addresses are automatically free. That also might need DTS updates to
> > describe all clients properly. But this change only needs to be done
> > once, and it will improve the description of the hardware.
> 
> Right, but I still suspect some users won't do their homework and
> discover address conflicts at runtime, maybe months later, in a painful
> way. Also a chip might be undocumented on a given board, so they could
> do their homework and still have problems.

Yes, we probably need a binding to mark an address as used even though
we don't know the device or don't have a driver for it.

Don't get me wrong, I know what you mean. One of my boards has a client
soldered in a way so that it is still in debug mode. That means it
listens to addresses 0x03-0x07 to provide debug information. Took me a
while to find out what is happening there.

But still, 'i2cdetect' showed all of these.

> Despite my comments, I'm not strongly against your proposal. To me it
> doesn't seem to solve any problem, while it does introduce some degree
> of risk. Could you elaborate more on but what benefit it introduces?

I'd think the risk of running out of defined addresses is somewhere
equal to running into (after a while) an unexpectedly used address.
I like the fix for the latter better because describing what is on the
bus is more helpful and generic than updating the pool-property every
time you need it. Plus, as mentioned above, other add-on hardware may
disturb your pool allocation.

I expect this topic to be one of the discussion points of the BoF.


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