Re: [PATCH 0/9] of/irq: Defer interrupt reference resolution

[Alexandre Belloni <alexandre.belloni@free-electrons.com>]

Hi Thierry,

On 16/09/2013 10:31, Thierry Reding wrote:
> Hi,
>
> This small series allows interrupt references from the device tree to be
> resolved at driver probe time, rather than at device creation time. The
> current implementation resolves such references while devices are added
> during the call to of_platform_populate(), which happens very early in
> the boot process. This causes probe ordering issues, because all devices
> that are an interrupt parent for other devices need to have been probed
> by that time. This is worked around for primary interrupt controllers by
> initializing them using a device tree specific way (of_irq_init()), but
> it doesn't work for something like a GPIO controller that is itself a
> platform device and an interrupt parent for other devices at the same
> time.
>
> Currently such drivers use explicit initcall ordering to force these
> chips to be probed earlier than other devices, but that only fixes a
> subset of the problematic cases. It doesn't work if the interrupt user
> is itself a platform device on the same bus. There are possibly other
> cases where it doesn't work either.
>
> This patch series attempts to fix this by not resolving the interrupt
> references at device creation time. Instead, some functionality is added
> to the driver core to resolve them for each device immediately before it
> is probed. Often this is a lot later than the point at which the device
> was created, which gives interrupt parents more time and therefore a
> better chance of being probed. More importantly, however, it allows the
> driver core to detect when an interrupt parent isn't there yet and cause
> the device to be queued for deferred probing. After all, resolving probe
> ordering issues is one of the primary reason for the introduction of
> deferred probing.
>
> Unfortunately the interrupt core code isn't prepared to handle this very
> well, so some preparatory work is required.
>
> Patch 1 is a bit of a cleanup. It modifies of_irq_count() to not use the
> heavyweight of_irq_to_resource(), which will actually try to create a
> mapping. While not usually harmful, it causes a warning during boot if
> the interrupt parent hasn't registered an IRQ domain yet. Furthermore it
> is much more than the stated intention of the function, which is to
> return the number of interrupts that a device node uses.
>
> Patches 2 and 3 introduce two new functions: __irq_create_mapping() and
> __irq_create_of_mapping(), which are both equivalent to the non-__ parts
> except that they return a negative error code on failure and therefore
> allow propagation of a precise error code instead of 0 for all errors.
> This is an important prerequisite for subsequent patches. I think that
> it would've been nice to not introduced underscore-prefixed variants but
> but there are about 130 callers and updating them all would've been
> rather messy.
>
> Patch 4 adds an of_irq_get() function, which is irq_of_parse_and_map()
> but returns a negative error code on failure instead of 0.
>
> Similarly, __of_irq_to_resource() as introduced in patch 5 is equivalent
> to of_irq_to_resource() but returns a negative error code on failure
> instead of 0.
>
> Patch 6 uses __of_irq_to_resource() to propagate error code to callers
> of the of_irq_to_resource_table() function.
>
> Patch 7 adds functionality to the platform driver code to resolve
> interrupt references at probe time. It uses the negative error code of
> the of_irq_to_resource_table() function to trigger deferred probing.
>
> Patch 8 implements similar functionality for I2C devices.
>
> Patch 9 serves as an example of the kind of cleanup that can be done
> after this series. Obviously this will require quite a bit of retesting
> of working setups, but I think that in the long run we're better off
> without the kind of explicit probe ordering employed by the gpio-tegra
> driver and many others.
>
> Note that I've only implemented this for platform and I2C devices, but
> the same can be done for SPI and possibly other subsystems as well.
>
> There is another use-case that I'm aware of for which a similar solution
> could be implemented. IOMMUs on SoCs generally need to hook themselves
> up to new platform devices. This causes a similar issues as interrupt
> resolution and should be fixable by extending the of_platform_probe()
> function introduced in patch 7 of this series.

I believe this will solve the issue I was hitting back in June where
of_i2c_register_devices() failed to get the IRQ while doing it at probe
time was working fine:

http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-i2c/msg12523.html

I couldn't test your patches yet though. I'll try to test as soon as I
get some free time.



-- 
Alexandre Belloni, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com