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Message-ID: <790d7a89-ae13-098f-3c0c-a8dfbc84e4a7@axentia.se>
Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2018 15:28:41 +0200
From: Peter Rosin <peda@...ntia.se>
To: Russell King - ARM Linux <linux@...linux.org.uk>,
Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@...asonboard.com>
Cc: dri-devel@...ts.freedesktop.org,
Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@....com>,
Boris Brezillon <boris.brezillon@...e-electrons.com>,
Alexandre Belloni <alexandre.belloni@...tlin.com>,
devicetree@...r.kernel.org, David Airlie <airlied@...ux.ie>,
linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Rob Herring <robh+dt@...nel.org>,
Jacopo Mondi <jacopo+renesas@...ndi.org>,
Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@...el.com>,
linux-arm-kernel@...ts.infradead.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v3 7/7] drm/i2c: tda998x: register as a drm bridge
On 2018-04-20 12:24, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 20, 2018 at 01:06:49PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
>> Hi Peter,
>>
>> Thank you for the patch.
>>
>> On Thursday, 19 April 2018 19:27:51 EEST Peter Rosin wrote:
>>> This makes this driver work with all(?) drivers that are not
>>> componentized and instead expect to connect to a panel/bridge. That
>>> said, the only one tested is atmel_hlcdc.
>>>
>>> This hooks the relevant work function previously called by the encoder
>>> and the component also to the bridge, since the encoder goes away when
>>> connecting to the bridge interface of the driver and the equivalent of
>>> bind/unbind of the component is handled by bridge attach/detach.
>>>
>>> The lifetime requirements of a bridge and a component are slightly
>>> different, which is the reason for struct tda998x_bridge.
>>
>> Couldn't you move the allocation and initialization (tda998x_create) of the
>> tda998x_priv structure to probe time ? I think you wouldn't need a separate
>> structure in that case. Unless I'm mistaken there would be an added benefit of
>> separating component and bridge initialization, resulting in the encoder not
>> being initialized at all if the component isn't used. You wouldn't need to add
>> a local_encoder parameter to the tda998x_init() function.
>
> No, I don't like that idea one bit, as I've stated in the past about the
> component API. The same (probably) goes for the bridge stuff too.
>
> Consider the following:
>
> Your DRM system is initialised. You then remove a module, which results
> in the DRM system being torn down. You re-insert the module (eg, having
> made a change to it). The DRM system is then re-initialised.
>
> At this point, what is the state of variables such as priv->is_on if
> you allocate the structure at probe time?
>
> What about all the other variables in the driver private structure - are
> you sure that the driver can cope with random values from the previous
> "usage" remaining there?
>
> At the moment, this isn't a concern for the driver because we
> dev_kzalloc() the structure in the bind callback. Move that to the
> probe function, and the structure is no longer re-initialised each
> time, and so it retains the previous state. The driver is not setup
> to cope with that.
>
> So, to work around that, you would need to reinitialise _everything_
> in the structure that the driver requires, which IMHO is a very
> open to bugs (eg, if a member is missed, or added without the
> necessary re-initialisation), _especially_ when this is not a path
> that will get regular testing.
>
> If you want to do this for a subset of data, it would be much better
> to separate them into independent structures (maybe one embedded into
> the other) so that this problem can not occur. That way, a subset
> of the data can be memset() when bound to the rest of the DRM system
> ensuring a consistent driver state and still achieve what you're
> suggesting.
This was the exact reason I added struct tda998x_bridge. It seemed
very risky to move the tda998x_create call (or some of its meat) to
the probe function. Even if that could be done I think it should
definitely be a separate patch.
Cheers,
Peter
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