Re: [PATCH 0/2] crypto: add new driver for Marvell CESA

[Jason Cooper <jason@lakedaemon.net>]

Hey Arnaud,

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 06:06:49PM +0200, Arnaud Ebalard wrote:
> Jason Cooper <jason@lakedaemon.net> writes:
...
> >> >> I really tried to adapt the existing driver to add the missing
> >> >> features (especially the support for TDMA), but all my attempts
> >> >> ended up introducing hackish code (not even talking about the
> >> >> performance penalty of this approach).
> >> > 
> >> > Ok, fair enough.  It would be helpful if this account of attempting to
> >> > reconcile the old driver made it into the commit message.  This puts us
> >> > in "perfect is the enemy of getting it done" territory.
> >> > 
> >> >> I have another solution though: keep the existing driver for old
> >> >> marvell SoCs (orion, kirkwood and dove), and add a new one for modern
> >> >> SoCs (armada 370, XP, 375 and 38x), so that users of the mv_cesa driver
> >> >> won't have to audit the new code.
> >> > 
> >> > A fair proposal, but I'll freely admit the number of people actually auditing
> >> > their code paths is orders of magnitude smaller than the number of users
> >> > of the driver.
> >> > 
> >> > There's such a large population of compatible legacy SoCs in the wild,
> >> > adding an artificial boundary doesn't make sense.  Especially since
> >> > we're talking about features everyone would want to use.
> >> > 
> >> > Perhaps we should keep both around, and deprecate the legacy driver over
> >> > 3 to 4 cycles?
> >> 
> >> But I guess that some users will want to use the new driver on the "old" marvell
> >> SoCs (especially kirkwood and dove).
> >
> > Yes, despite my arguments, I'm one of those people.  :-P
> >
> >> If we go to this path, then the best solution would be to still update
> >> all the the dts, and modifying the old driver to be able to use the
> >> new binding: for my point of view the only adaptation should be
> >> related to the SRAM. It will be also needed to find a way to be able
> >> to load only one driver at a time: either the old or the new, but not
> >> both.
> 
> The approach Boris proposed above seems to make everyone happy:
> 
>  1) Keep the old driver for old marvells SoCs (kirkwood, dove and orion)
>  2) Introduce the new driver for those that are not supported by the old
>     driver, i.e. armada (370, XP, 375, 38x)
> 
> AFAICT, this can easily be done (based on compatible strings) and it
> will let everyone the time to audit the new driver. Current users will
> not be taken by surprise. At some point, when everyone is confident w/
> the new driver, we can then switch to that one for all SoCs so that
> old platform get more performance.
> 
> Additionnally, for those who want to get the feature of the new driver
> for their old SoC right now, we *could* add a simple kernel config option
> for the new driver to use it for the old SoC too (that one disabling the
> old one).
> 
> 
> > I'd appreciate if we'd look into it.  I understand from on-list and
> > off-list discussion that the rewrite was unavoidable.  So I'm willing to
> > concede that.  Giving people time to migrate from old to new while still
> > being able to update for other security fixes seems reasonable.
> 
> Jason, what do you think of the approach above? 

I say keep it simple.  We shouldn't use the DT changes to trigger one
vice the other.  We need to be able to build both, but only load one at
a time.  If that's anything other than simple to do, then we make it a
Kconfig binary choice and move on.

thx,

Jason.