Re: [PATCH v2 01/15] ARM: Introduce atomic MMIO modify

[Ezequiel Garcia <ezequiel.garcia@free-electrons.com>]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:45:21AM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Tuesday 21 January 2014 06:12:27 Ezequiel Garcia wrote:
> > Some SoC have MMIO regions that are shared across orthogonal
> > subsystems. This commit implements a possible solution for the
> > thread-safe access of such regions through a spinlock-protected API.
> > 
> > Concurrent access is protected with a single spinlock for the
> > entire MMIO address space. While this protects shared-registers,
> > it also serializes access to unrelated/unshared registers.
> > 
> > We add relaxed and non-relaxed variants, by using writel_relaxed and writel,
> > respectively. The rationale for this is that some users may not require
> > register write completion but only thread-safe access to a register.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Ezequiel Garcia <ezequiel.garcia@free-electrons.com>
> 
> You add the new atomic mmio interfaces in an ARM global header file,
> but at the same time make them ARM-only. I'm not opposed to having
> interfaces like that, but I'm not convinced they are actually needed
> for this case and if we go there, it needs to be done more carefully
> and should be available for all architectures so that portable drivers
> can use them.
> 

Yes, true. We've discussed about this and even post an arch-generic API:

http://lwn.net/Articles/564709/

In the end it was decided to keep it ARM-specific for now:

http://www.spinics.net/lists/arm-kernel/msg271773.html

Just for reference, the last posted patchset for the atomic I/O API
is this:

http://www.spinics.net/lists/arm-kernel/msg292775.html

> It also seems to duplicate functionality that is already present in
> regmap-mmio.
> 

Yes, this is true. We tried to use regmap-mmio/syscon but we need this
to initialize the clocksource which is too early for that to work:

https://www.mail-archive.com/linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org/msg484535.html

-- 
Ezequiel García, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android Engineering
http://free-electrons.com
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