Re: [PATCH v5 14/18] PCI/pwrctl: add a power control driver for WCN7850

Bartosz Golaszewski
2024-02-22T09:23:02Z

On Wed, Feb 21, 2024 at 12:44 AM Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Feb 20, 2024 at 10:21:04PM +0100, Konrad Dybcio wrote:
> > On 20.02.2024 13:47, Mark Brown wrote:
>
> > > Are you *sure* this actually happens (and that the regulators don't
> > > figure it out by themselves), especially given that the consumers are
> > > just specifying the load once rather than varying it dynamically at
> > > runtime which is supposed to be the use case for this API? This API is
> > > intended to be used dynamically, if the regulator always needs to be in
> > > a particular mode just configure that statically.
>
> > *AFAIU*
>
> > The regulators aggregate the requested current (there may be
> > multiple consumers) and then it's decided if it's high enough
> > to jump into HPM.
>
> Yes, that's the theory - I just question if it actually does something
> useful in practice. Between regulators getting more and more able to
> figure out mode switching autonomously based on load monitoring and them
> getting more efficient it's become very unclear if this actually
> accomplishes anything, the only usage is the Qualcomm stuff and that's
> all really unsophisticated and has an air of something that's being
> cut'n'pasted forwards rather than delivering practical results. There
> is some value at ultra low loads, but that's more for suspend modes than
> for actual use.

Removing it would be out of scope for this series and I don't really
want to introduce any undefined behavior when doing a big development
like that. I'll think about it separately.

Bart