Re: clock driver

[York Sun <yorksun@freescale.com>]

On 05/26/2015 03:38 PM, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 12:12:11PM -0700, York Sun wrote:
>> Linux experts,
>>
>> I have rewritten a driver for Silicon Labs SI5338 programmable clock chip. The
>> original driver was written by Andrey (CC'ed), but was floatingn outside of the
>> kernel. The driver was written to use sysfs as the interface, not the common
>> clock framework. I wonder if I have to rewrite the driver following common clock
>> framework. One concern is to support a feature to accept ClockBuilder (TM)
>> output on sysfs. I don't see sysfs support on common clock framework. Please
>> correct me if I am wrong.
>>
>> If not using common clock framework is acceptable, I would like to send a RFC
>> patch for review.
>>
> My original driver for si570 was rejected because it didn't support the clock
> framework, so you might face an uphill battle.
> 
> SI provides a document for SI5338 describing how to configure it without
> using clockbuilder [1]. Can that be used to implement generic code which
> doesn't need clockbuilder ?
> 

The driver is capable to handle the user's input and enable the clocks. Removing
the support of importing is a step back. At least it is a feature I am using. I
believe Andrey also used this feature when the driver was first drafted.

That being said, my application relies on setting multiple clock chips on a PCIe
device. That means I cannot put the configuration into device tree. There may be
a way to fill device tree, but I am not ready to explore yet. Without a sysfs
interface, can I change the configuration for each clock?

I also found COMMON_CLK is a bool, not tristate. It is only selected by others.
Is there a reason for doing so? My current platform (P1022DS) doesn't have
CONFIG_COMMON_CLK enabled.

York