Re: [PATCH v2 1/3] media: V3s: Add support for Allwinner CSI.

[Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>]

Hi Hans,

On Wednesday, 23 August 2017 09:52:00 EEST Hans Verkuil wrote:
> On 08/22/2017 10:17 PM, Maxime Ripard wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 22, 2017 at 08:43:35AM +0200, Hans Verkuil wrote:
> >>>>> +static int sun6i_video_link_setup(struct media_entity *entity,
> >>>>> +				  const struct media_pad *local,
> >>>>> +				  const struct media_pad *remote, u32 flags)
> >>>>> +{
> >>>>> +	struct video_device *vdev = media_entity_to_video_device(entity);
> >>>>> +	struct sun6i_video *video = video_get_drvdata(vdev);
> >>>>> +
> >>>>> +	if (WARN_ON(video == NULL))
> >>>>> +		return 0;
> >>>>> +
> >>>>> +	return sun6i_video_formats_init(video);
> >>>> 
> >>>> Why is this called here? Why not in video_init()?
> >>> 
> >>> sun6i_video_init is in the driver probe context. 
> >>> sun6i_video_formats_init use media_entity_remote_pad and
> >>> media_entity_to_v4l2_subdev to find the subdevs.
> >>> The media_entity_remote_pad can't work before all the media pad linked.
> >> 
> >> A video_init is typically called from the notify_complete callback.
> >> Actually, that's where the video_register_device should be created as
> >> well. When you create it in probe() there is possibly no sensor yet, so
> >> it would be a dead video node (or worse, crash when used).
> >> 
> >> There are still a lot of platform drivers that create the video node in
> >> the probe, but it's not the right place if you rely on the async loading
> >> of subdevs.
> > 
> > That's not really related, but I'm not really sure it's a good way to
> > operate. This essentially means that you might wait forever for a
> > component in your pipeline to be probed, without any chance of it
> > happening (not compiled, compiled as a module and not loaded, hardware
> > defect preventing the driver from probing properly, etc), even though
> > that component might not be essential.
> 
> We're talking straightforward video pipelines here. I.e. a source, some
> processing units and a DMA engine at the end.

As a first step possibly, but many SoCs have ISPs that are not supported by 
the initial camera driver version.

> There is no point in creating a video node if the pipeline is not complete
> since you need the full pipeline.
> 
> I've had bad experiences in the past where video nodes were created too
> soon and part of the internal state was still incomplete, causing at best
> weird behavior and at worst crashes.

Drivers obviously need to be fixed if they are buggy in that regard. Such race 
conditions are definitely something I keep an eye on when reviewing code.

> More complex devices are a whole different ballgame.
> 
> > This is how DRM operates, and you sometimes end up in some very dumb
> > situations where you wait for say, the DSI controller to probe, while
> > you only care about HDMI in your system.
> > 
> > But this seems to be on of the hot topic these days, so we might
> > discuss it further in some other thread :)

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart