Re: fbtft: 5 years in staging

[Sam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org>]

Hi Noralf

On Sun, Feb 02, 2020 at 04:41:54PM +0100, Noralf Trønnes wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Since I'm the original author of fbtft I thought I'd highlight a couple
> of issues that's probably not well known.
> 
> Right after fbtft was added, fbdev was closed for new drivers[1] and
> the fbdev maintainer wanted to remove fbtft as a consequence of that
> decision, but Greg KH said he'd keep fbtft drivers in staging
> "until a matching DRM driver is present in the tree"[2].
> 
> There are 2 issues wrt the goal of making a matching DRM driver
> (strictly speaking). One is impossible to do (policy), the other is
> unlikely to happen:
> 
> 1. Device Tree 'init' property
> 
> All fbtft drivers have controller setup code that matches one
> particular display panel. From the start of fbtft it was possible to
> override this using platform data. Later when Device Tree support was
> added, an 'init=' property to do the same was added.
> 
> Example:
> 	init = <0x10000e5 0x78F0
> 		0x1000001 0x0100
> 		0x2000032
> 		0x1000007 0x0133>;
> 
> This translates to:
> 	register_write(0x00e5, 0x78F0);
> 	register_write(0x0001, 0x0100);
> 	mdelay(32);
> 	register_write(0x0007, 0x0133);
> 
> AFAIU setting register values from DT is a no-go, so this functionality
> can't be replicated in a DRM driver. Many displays are made to work
> using this mechanism, in particular ili9341 based ones.
> 
> 2. Parallel bus interface
> 
> All fbtft drivers support both a SPI and a parallel bus interface
> through the fbtft helper module. Many (not all) controllers support more
> than one interface. The parallel bus support was added to fbtft in its
> early days when not many SPI displays were available (nowadays there's
> lots to choose from). fbtft uses bitbanging to drive the parallel
> interface so it's really slow, even more slow than SPI and SPI with DMA
> beats it thoroughly. I know there are people that use the paralell bus
> support, but I don't see much point in it unless we get a parallel bus
> subsystem that can use the dedicated hw on certain SoC's (Beaglebone,
> Pi). And those SOC's most likely have a parallel video/RGB bus as well,
> which IMO is a much better option for a panel.
> 
> 
> The following drivers have DRM counterparts that have the same panel
> setup code:
> 
> - fb_hx8357d.c: drivers/gpu/drm/tiny/hx8357d.c
> - fb_ili9341.c: drivers/gpu/drm/tiny/mi0283qt.c
> - fb_st7735r.c: drivers/gpu/drm/tiny/st7735r.c
> - fb_ili9486.c: Patches are posted on dri-devel[3]
> 
> But they don't support all panels based on that controller and they
> don't have parallel bus support.
> 
> There is actually also another obstacle for conversion and that is, some
> of the displays (for which there is builtin driver support) might be
> impossible to source except as second hand. And it's not always obvious
> which panel is supported by a certain driver.
> At least the displays supported by these drivers are listed as
> discontinued on the fbtft wiki[4]:
> - fb_hx8340bn.c
> - fb_hx8347d.c
> - fb_ili9320
> 
> This one never made it from a prototype to an actual product, because
> it was too slow:
> - fb_watterott.c
> 
> I have no plans to convert fbtft drivers myself, but I figured a 5 year
> anniversary was a good excuse for a status update.

Thanks for the history lesson and the status update, a very informative
and interesting read.

Thanks for all your work in this area!

	Sam

> 
> Noralf.
> 
> [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/9/24/253
> [2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/11/23/146
> [3] https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/series/72645/
> [4] https://github.com/notro/fbtft/wiki/LCD-Modules#discontinued-products
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