Re: [PATCH] drm/i915: Add private api for power well usage -- alignment between graphic team and audio team

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:57:08 +0200,
Daniel Vetter wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 07:53:41AM +0000, Li, Jocelyn wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Daniel Vetter [mailto:daniel.vetter@ffwll.ch] 
> > Sent: Friday, April 26, 2013 3:25 PM
> > To: Li, Jocelyn
> > Cc: Wang, Xingchao; Zanoni, Paulo R; ville.syrjala@linux.intel.com; Lin, Mengdong; Girdwood, Liam R; intel-gfx@lists.freedesktop.org; alsa-devel@alsa-project.org; Wang Xingchao; Takashi Iwai; Barnes, Jesse; Wysocki, Rafael J; Hindman, Gavin
> > Subject: Re: [PATCH] drm/i915: Add private api for power well usage -- alignment between graphic team and audio team
> > Once we've figured out what needs to be changed in the audio driver we
> > can look at the entire patch series and the interface to i915.ko.
> > That's also why I didn't comment on Xingchao's patch right away, but
> > only once he specifically asked for feedback, since doing a real review
> > of the interface doesn't make sense until we have all the pieces (and a
> > working audio driver).
> > 
> > [Jocelyn] I think you have made constructive comments on Xingchao's
> > patch yesterday. Next, shall we have Xingchao improve his patch? Or we
> > just have Xingchao wait till you have completed your pieces. Sorry, I am
> > a little confused :)
> 
> I think the next step is to use Xinchao's patch as-is and get the audio
> side going. Once we have that fixed up, we can revisit the interface and
> make it solid. But for now trying to polish this relatively simple part
> seems like wasted time.
> 
> Also, reviewing an interface is much easier if we have both the i915
> pieces (already here) and the audio pieces (which I haven't seen yet)
> avaialble.

I haven't checked the patch properly yet, but the patch pasted in the
post looks like i915 driver exports the functions to control power
well, and let audio driver calling them.  If so, the big mess in such
a case is the dependency between driver modules.

A simple workaround would be to split this function and the relevant
instance out of i915 and snd-hda-intel and put into an individual
module (e.g. i915-powerwell-ctl).

Also, it would be feasible to implement some PM governor over both
graphics and audio, that is, it gives the proper serialization of
power up for audio controller, for example.


thanks,

Takashi