Re: [PATCH v5 04/11] clocksource/drivers: Add HPE GXP timer

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

On Fri, Apr 22, 2022 at 3:16 PM Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 21, 2022 at 9:21 PM <nick.hawkins@hpe.com> wrote:
>
> > +
> > +static struct platform_device gxp_watchdog_device = {
> > +       .name = "gxp-wdt",
> > +       .id = -1,
> > +};
> > +/*
> > + * This probe gets called after the timer is already up and running. This will create
> > + * the watchdog device as a child since the registers are shared.
> > + */
> > +
> > +static int gxp_timer_probe(struct platform_device *pdev)
> > +{
> > +       struct device *dev = &pdev->dev;
> > +
> > +       /* Pass the base address (counter) as platform data and nothing else */
> > +       gxp_watchdog_device.dev.platform_data = local_gxp_timer->counter;
> > +       gxp_watchdog_device.dev.parent = dev;
> > +       return platform_device_register(&gxp_watchdog_device);
> > +}
>
> I don't understand what this is about: the device should be created from
> DT, not defined statically in the code. There are multiple ways of creating
> a platform_device from a DT node, or you can allocate one here, but static
> definitions are generally a mistake.
>
> I see that you copied this from the ixp4xx driver, so I think we should fix this
> there as well.

The ixp4xx driver looks like that because the register range used for
the timer and the watchdog is combined, i.e. it is a single IP block:

                timer@c8005000 {
                        compatible = "intel,ixp4xx-timer";
                        reg = <0xc8005000 0x100>;
                        interrupts = <5 IRQ_TYPE_LEVEL_HIGH>;
                };

Device tree probing does not allow two devices to probe from the same
DT node, so this was solved by letting the (less important) watchdog
be spawn as a platform device from the timer.

I don't know if double-probing for the same register range can be fixed,
but I was assuming that the one-compatible-to-one-driver assumption
was pretty hard-coded into the abstractions. Maybe it isn't?

Another way is of course to introduce an MFD. That becomes
problematic in another way: MFD abstractions are supposed to
be inbetween the resource and the devices it spawns, and with
timers/clocksources this creates a horrible special-casing since the
MFD bus (the parent may be providing e.g. an MMIO regmap)
then need to be early-populated and searched by the timer core
from TIMER_OF_DECLARE() early in boot.

So this solution was the lesser evil that I could think about.

Yours,
Linus Walleij