Re: [PATCH 1/2] pinctrl: sunxi: Deal with per-bank regulators

[Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org>]

On Thu, Dec 6, 2018 at 3:02 PM Maxime Ripard <maxime.ripard@bootlin.com> wrote:

> The Allwinner SoCs have on most of their GPIO banks a regulator input.
>
> This issue was mainly ignored so far because either the regulator was a
> static regulator that would be providing power anyway, or the bank was used
> for a feature unsupported so far (CSI). For the odd cases, enabling it in
> the bootloader was the preferred option.
>
> However, now that we are starting to support those features, and that we
> can't really rely on the bootloader for this, we need to model those
> regulators as such in the DT.
>
> This is slightly more complicated than what it looks like, since some
> regulators will be tied to the PMIC, and in order to have access to the
> PMIC bus, you need to mux its pins, which will need the pinctrl driver,
> that needs the regulator driver to be registered. And this is how you get a
> circular dependency.
>
> In practice however, the hardware cannot fall into this case since it would
> result in a completely unusable bus. In order to avoid that circular
> dependency, we can thus get and enable the regulators at pin_request time.
> We'll then need to account for the references of all the pins of a
> particular branch to know when to put the reference, but it works pretty
> nicely once implemented.
>
> Signed-off-by: Maxime Ripard <maxime.ripard@bootlin.com>

Patch applied.

Yours,
Linus Walleij