Re: [resend/standalone PATCH v4] Add auxiliary bus support

From: Alexandre Belloni <alexandre.belloni@bootlin.com>
To: Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>,
	Pierre-Louis Bossart <pierre-louis.bossart@linux.intel.com>,
	alsa-devel@alsa-project.org, Kiran Patil <kiran.patil@intel.com>,
	linux-rdma <linux-rdma@vger.kernel.org>,
	Shiraz Saleem <shiraz.saleem@intel.com>,
	Martin Habets <mhabets@solarflare.com>,
	Liam Girdwood <lgirdwood@gmail.com>,
	Ranjani Sridharan <ranjani.sridharan@linux.intel.com>,
	Fred Oh <fred.oh@linux.intel.com>,
	Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org>, Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@nvidia.com>,
	Dave Ertman <david.m.ertman@intel.com>,
	Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>, Netdev <netdev@vger.kernel.org>,
	Leon Romanovsky <leonro@nvidia.com>,
	David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	Parav Pandit <parav@mellanox.com>
Subject: Re: [resend/standalone PATCH v4] Add auxiliary bus support
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2020 22:19:37 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20201217211937.GA3177478@piout.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <X8usiKhLCU3PGL9J@kroah.com>

Hello,

On 05/12/2020 16:51:36+0100, Greg KH wrote:
> > To me, the documentation was written, and reviewed, more from the
> > perspective of "why not open code a custom bus instead". So I can see
> > after the fact how that is a bit too much theory and justification and
> > not enough practical application. Before the fact though this was a
> > bold mechanism to propose and it was not clear that everyone was
> > grokking the "why" and the tradeoffs.
> 
> Understood, I guess I read this from the "of course you should do this,
> now how do I use it?" point of view.  Which still needs to be addressed
> I feel.
> 
> > I also think it was a bit early to identify consistent design patterns
> > across the implementations and codify those. I expect this to evolve
> > convenience macros just like other parts of the driver-core gained
> > over time. Now that it is in though, another pass through the
> > documentation to pull in more examples seems warranted.
> 
> A real, working, example would be great to have, so that people can know
> how to use this.  Trying to dig through the sound or IB patches to view
> how it is being used is not a trivial thing to do, which is why
> reviewing this took so much work.  Having a simple example test module,
> that creates a number of devices on a bus, ideally tied into the ktest
> framework, would be great.  I'll attach below a .c file that I used for
> some basic local testing to verify some of this working, but it does not
> implement a aux bus driver, which needs to be also tested.
> 

There is something I don't get from the documentation and it is what is
this introducing that couldn't already be done using platform drivers
and platform devices?

We already have a bunch of drivers in tree that have to share a state
and register other drivers from other subsystems for the same device.
How is the auxiliary bus different?

-- 
Alexandre Belloni, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com