Re: [PATCH 4/7] mfd: ds90ux9xx: add TI DS90Ux9xx de-/serializer MFD driver

[Vladimir Zapolskiy <vladimir_zapolskiy@mentor.com>]

Hi Laurent,

On 10/12/2018 04:01 PM, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> Hello Vladimir,
> 
> On Friday, 12 October 2018 14:47:52 EEST Kieran Bingham wrote:
>> On 12/10/18 11:58, Vladimir Zapolskiy wrote:

[snip]

>> Essentially they are multi purpose buses - which do not yet have a home.
>> We have used media as a home because of our use case.
>>
>> The use case whether they transfer frames from a camera or to a display
>> are of course closely related, but ultimately covered by two separate
>> subsystems at the pixel level (DRM vs V4L, or other for other data)
>>
>> Perhaps as they are buses - on a level with USB or I2C (except they can
>> of course carry I2C or Serial as well as 'bi-directional video' etc ),
>> they are looking for their own subsystem.
>>
>> Except I don't think we don't want to add a new subsystem for just one
>> (or two) devices...
> 
> I'm not sure a new subsystem is needed. As you've noted there's an overlap 
> between drivers/media/ and drivers/gpu/drm/ in terms of supported hardware.
> We even have a devices supported by two drivers, one in drivers/media/ and
> one in drivers/gpu/drm/ (I'm thinking about the adv7511 in particular).
> This is a well known issue, and so far nothing has been done in mainline
> to try and solve it.

I agree that there's an overlap between drivers/media/ and drivers/gpu/drm/,
formally a hypothetical (sic!) DS90Ux9xx video bridge cell driver should be
added into both subsystems also, and the actual driver of two should be
selected in runtime. I call such a driver 'hypothetical', because in fact
I don't have it, and I'm not so sure that its existence is justified, but
that's only because DS90Ux9xx video bridge functionality is _transparent_,
it does not have any controls literally, but it is a pure luck eventually.

So, as I've stated in my cover letter, I can misuse yours 'lvds-encoder'
driver only for the purpose of establishing a mediated link between 
an LVDS controller and a panel over a serializer-deserializer pair.

> Trying to find another home in drivers/mfd/ to escape from the problem isn't a 
> good solution in my opinion. The best option from a Linux point of view would 
> be to unify V4L2 and DRM/KMS when it comes to bridge support, but that's a 
> long way down the road (I won't complain if you want to give it a go though 
> :-)).

I return you a wider smile :)

> As your use cases are display, focused, I would propose to start with 
> drivers/gpu/drm/bridge/, and leave the problem of camera support for first 
> person who will have such a use case.

Frankly speaking I would like to start from copy-pasting your 'lvds-encoder'
driver into an 'absolutely-transparent-video-bridge' driver with no LVDS
or 'encoder' specifics, adding just a new compatible may suffice, if the
driver is renamed/redefined.

PS, I remember I owe you a reference OF snippet of data path to a panel.

--
Best wishes,
Vladimir