Re: [PATCH v4 5/9] drivers: base: cacheinfo: arm64: Add support for ACPI based firmware tables

[Jeremy Linton <jeremy.linton@arm.com>]

On 11/20/2017 10:56 AM, Sudeep Holla wrote:

(trimming)

>>    *	case there's no explicit cache node or the cache node itself in the
>>    *	device tree
>> + * @firmware_node: Shared with of_node. When not using DT, this may contain
>> + *	pointers to other firmware based values. Particularly ACPI/PPTT
>> + *	unique values.
>>    * @disable_sysfs: indicates whether this node is visible to the user via
>>    *	sysfs or not
>>    * @priv: pointer to any private data structure specific to particular
>> @@ -64,8 +67,10 @@ struct cacheinfo {
>>   #define CACHE_ALLOCATE_POLICY_MASK	\
>>   	(CACHE_READ_ALLOCATE | CACHE_WRITE_ALLOCATE)
>>   #define CACHE_ID		BIT(4)
>> -
>> -	struct device_node *of_node;
>> +	union {
>> +		struct device_node *of_node;
>> +		void *firmware_node;
>> +	};
> 
> I would prefer
> 	struct device_node *of_node;
> changed to
> 	struct fwnode_handle *fwnode;
> 
> You can then have
> 	struct pptt_fwnode {
> 		<.....>
> 		/*below fwnode  allocated using acpi_alloc_fwnode_static */
> 		struct fwnode_handle *fwnode;
> 	};
> 
> This gives a good starting point to abstract DT and ACPI.
> 
> If not now, we can later implement fwnode.ops=pptt_cache_ops and then
> use get property for both DT and ACPI.


I'm obviously confused why this keeps coming up. On the surface it 
sounds like a good idea. But then, given that I've actually implemented 
a portion of it, what becomes clear is that the PPTT isn't a good match. 
Converting the OF routines to use the fwnode is fairly straightforward, 
but that doesn't help the ACPI situation other than to create a lot of 
misleading code (and the possibility of creating nonstandard DSDT 
entries). The fact that this hasn't been done for other tables 
MADT/SLIT/SRAT/etc makes me wonder why we should do it for the PPTT?

Particularly, when one considers fwnode is more a DSDT<->DT abstraction 
and thus has a lot of API surface that simply doesn't make any sense 
given the PPTT binary tree structure. Given that most of the fwnode 
routines are translating string properties (for example 
fwnode_property_read_string()) it might be possible to build a 
translator of some form which takes DT style properties and attempts to 
map them to the ACPI PPTT tree. What this adds I can't fathom, beyond 
the fact that suddenly the fwnode interface is a partial/brittle 
implementation where a large subset of the fwnode_operations will tend 
to be degenerate cases. The result likely will be a poorly implemented 
translator which breaks or is meaningless over a large part of the 
fwnode API surface.