Re: [PATCH 1/3] Input: twl4030-vibra: fix sibling-node lookup

Johan Hovold
2017-11-13T09:35:44Z

On Mon, Nov 13, 2017 at 09:11:44AM +0000, Lee Jones wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Nov 2017, Johan Hovold wrote:
>
> > [ +CC: Lee, Rob and device-tree list ]
> >
> > On Sat, Nov 11, 2017 at 09:50:59AM -0800, Dmitry Torokhov wrote:
> > > On Sat, Nov 11, 2017 at 04:43:37PM +0100, Johan Hovold wrote:
> > > > A helper purported to look up a child node based on its name was using
> > > > the wrong of-helper and ended up prematurely freeing the parent of-node
> > > > while searching the whole device tree depth-first starting at the parent
> > > > node.
> > >
> > > Ugh, this all is pretty ugly business. Can we teach MFD to allow
> > > specifying firmware node to be attached to the platform devices it
> > > creates in mfd_add_device() so that the leaf drivers simply call
> > > device_property_read_XXX() on their own device and not be bothered with
> > > weird OF refcount issues or what node they need to locate and parse?
>
> If a child compatible is provided, we already set the child's
> of_node. It's then up to the driver (set) author(s) to use it in the
> correct manner.
>
> > Yeah, that may have helped. You can actually specify a compatible string
> > in struct mfd_cell today which does make mfd_add_device() associate a
> > matching child node.
> >
> > Some best practice regarding how to deal with MFD and device tree would
> > be good to determine and document too. For example, when should
> > of_platform_populate() be used in favour of mfd_add_device()?
>
> When the device supports DT and its entire hierarchical layout, along
> with all of its attributes can be expressed in DT.

Ok, a follow up: When there are different variants of an MFD and that
affects the child drivers, then that should be expressed in in the child
node compatibles rather than having the child match on the parent node?

I'm asking because this came up recently during review and their seems
to be no precedent for matching on the parent compatible in child
drivers:

https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20171105154725.GA11226@localhost

> > And how best to deal with sibling nodes, which is part of the problem
> > here (I think the mfd should have provided a flag rather than having
> > subdrivers deal with sibling nodes, for example).
>
> I disagree. The only properties the MFD (parent) driver is interested
> in is ones which are shared across multiple child devices.
> *Everything* which pertains to only a single child device should be
> handled by its accompanying driver.

Even if that means leaking details of one child driver into a sibling?
Isn't it then cleaner to use the parent MFD to coordinate between the
cells, just as we do for IO?

In this case a child driver looked up a sibling node based on name, but
that doesn't mean the node is active, that there's a driver bound, or
that the sibling node has some other random property for example. The
parent could be used for such coordination, if only to pass information
from one sibling to another.

Thanks,
Johan