Re: [PATCH v5 5/5] tty/serial: Add Spreadtrum sc9836-uart driver support

[Rob Herring <robherring2@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 3:55 AM, Lyra Zhang <zhang.lyra@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 12:41 AM, Rob Herring <robherring2@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 4:00 AM, Chunyan Zhang
>> <chunyan.zhang@spreadtrum.com> wrote:
>>> Add a full sc9836-uart driver for SC9836 SoC which is based on the
>>> spreadtrum sharkl64 platform.
>>> This driver also support earlycon.
>>> This patch also replaced the spaces between the macros and their
>>> values with the tabs in serial_core.h

[...]

>>> +static int __init sprd_serial_init(void)
>>> +{
>>> +       int ret = 0;
>>> +
>>> +       ret = uart_register_driver(&sprd_uart_driver);
>>
>> This can be done in probe now. Then you can use module_platform_driver().
>>
>
> Question:
> 1. there are 4 uart ports configured in dt for sprd_serial, so probe
> will be called 4 times, but uart_register_driver only needs to be
> called one time, so can we use uart_driver.state to check if
> uart_register_driver has already been called ?

Yes.

> 2. if I use module_platform_driver() instead of
> module_init(sprd_serial_init)  and  module_exit(sprd_serial_exit) , I
> must move uart_unregister_driver() which is now processed in
> sprd_serial_exit() to sprd_remove(), there is a similar problem with
> probe(), sprd_remove() will also be called 4 times, and actually it
> should be called only one time. How can we deal with this case?

Look at pl01x or Samsung UART drivers which have done this conversion.

> 3. for the second question, we can check the platform_device->id, if
> it is equal to the index of last port (e.g. 4 for this case), then
> uart_unregister_driver() can be called. Does it work correctly? since
> for this case, we must keep the order of releasing ports.

The id will not be the line index in the DT case. I don't think you
can guarantee the order either.

It would be better to make uart_{un}register_driver deal with being
called multiple times so drivers don't have to deal with getting this
correct. I'm not sure if that is feasible though.

Rob