Re: [PATCH v10 0/9] Add the I3C subsystem

[Boris Brezillon <boris.brezillon@bootlin.com>]

On Fri, 16 Nov 2018 12:31:42 +0000
vitor <vitor.soares@synopsys.com> wrote:

> Hi Boris,
> 
> 
> On 15/11/18 19:00, Boris Brezillon wrote:
> > On Thu, 15 Nov 2018 18:03:47 +0000
> > vitor <vitor.soares@synopsys.com> wrote:
> >  
> >> Hi Boris,
> >>
> >>
> >> On 15/11/18 15:28, Boris Brezillon wrote:  
> >>> On Thu, 15 Nov 2018 16:01:37 +0100
> >>> Wolfram Sang <wsa@the-dreams.de> wrote:
> >>>     
> >>>> Hi Boris,
> >>>>     
> >>>>> What we could do though, is expose I3C devices that do not have a
> >>>>> driver in kernel space, like spidev does.  
> >>>> ...
> >>>>     
> >>>>> Mark, Wolfram, Arnd, Greg, any opinion?  
> >>>> Is there a benefit for having drivers in userspace? My gut feeling is to
> >>>> encourage people to write kernel drivers. If this is, for some reason,
> >>>> not possible for some driver, then we have a use case at hand to test
> >>>> the then-to-be-developed userspace interface against. Until then, I
> >>>> personally wouldn't waste effort on designing it without a user in
> >>>> sight.  
> >>> I kind of agree with that. Vitor, do you have a use case in mind for
> >>> such userspace drivers? I don't think it's worth designing an API for
> >>> something we don't need (yet).  
> >> My use case is a tool for tests, lets say like the i2c tools.  
> > What would you like to test exactly?
> >  
> >> There is
> >> other subsystems, some of them mentioned on this thread, that have and
> >> ioctl system call or other method to change parameters or send data.  
> > I don't think they added the /dev interface before having a real use
> > case for it.
> >  
> >>
> >> I rise this topic because I really think it worth to define now how this
> >> should be design (and for me how to do the things right) to avoid future
> >> issues.  
> > Actually it should be done the other way around: you should have a real
> > need and the /dev interface should be designed to fulfill this need.
> > Based on this real use case we can discuss other potential usage that
> > might appear in the future and try to design something more
> > future-proof, but clearly, this userspace interface should be driven by
> > a real/well-defined use case.
> >
> > Also, exposing things to userspace is way more risky than adding a new
> > in-kernel subsystem/framework, because it then becomes part of the
> > stable ABI.
> >
> > To make things clearer, I'm not against the idea of exposing I3C
> > devices (or I3C buses) to userspace, but I'd like to understand what you
> > plan to do with that. If this is about testing, what kind of tests
> > you'd like to run. If this is about developing drivers in userspace,
> > why can't these be done in kernel space (license issues?), and what
> > would those drivers be allowed to do?  
> 
> 
> Basically I need a tool that help me during the development and to avoid 
> me to write a dummy driver for each device that I test.

But we want I3C device drivers to be upstreamed, so why not developing a
real driver everytime you test a new device and submitting it upstream?

> 
> For instances do some read/write,

Doing SDR/DDR transfers is probably acceptable, but I still think we
should push hard to have kernel drivers when that's possible.

> get/set ccc commands,

Exposing CCC commands is definitely not a good idea, since they're not
even exposed to kernel drivers.

> if something 
> goes wrong during the bus initialization have a to debug etc...

Can't we add such a debug infrastructure in the kernel. Maybe we can
expose debugfs files too if that helps, though if those debugfs files
are actually used by userspace libs/tools, it's not any better than
ioctls or sysfs files, since they will anyway become a stable ABI.

> 
> 
> For me this is a valid use case and I imagine when people start to 
> develop in i3c this interface will help everyone.

How about you propose an i3cdev driver that allow users to do SDR
transfers throuh an ioctl?