[resend/standalone PATCH v4] Add auxiliary bus support

[Dan Williams]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 1:17 PM Alexandre Belloni
<alexandre.belloni at bootlin.com> wrote:
>
> On 18/12/2020 16:58:56-0400, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> > On Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 08:32:11PM +0000, Mark Brown wrote:
> >
> > > > So, I strongly suspect, MFD should create mfd devices on a MFD bus
> > > > type.
> > >
> > > Historically people did try to create custom bus types, as I have
> > > pointed out before there was then pushback that these were duplicating
> > > the platform bus so everything uses platform bus.
> >
> > Yes, I vaugely remember..
> >
> > I don't know what to say, it seems Greg doesn't share this view of
> > platform devices as a universal device.
> >
> > Reading between the lines, I suppose things would have been happier
> > with some kind of inheritance scheme where platform device remained as
> > only instantiated directly in board files, while drivers could bind to
> > OF/DT/ACPI/FPGA/etc device instantiations with minimal duplication &
> > boilerplate.
> >
> > And maybe that is exactly what we have today with platform devices,
> > though the name is now unfortunate.
> >
> > > I can't tell the difference between what it's doing and what SOF is
> > > doing, the code I've seen is just looking at the system it's running
> > > on and registering a fixed set of client devices.  It looks slightly
> > > different because it's registering a device at a time with some wrapper
> > > functions involved but that's what the code actually does.
> >
> > SOF's aux bus usage in general seems weird to me, but if you think
> > it fits the mfd scheme of primarily describing HW to partition vs
> > describing a SW API then maybe it should use mfd.
> >
> > The only problem with mfd as far as SOF is concerned was Greg was not
> > happy when he saw PCI stuff in the MFD subsystem.
> >
>
> But then again, what about non-enumerable devices on the PCI device? I
> feel this would exactly fit MFD. This is a collection of IPs that exist
> as standalone but in this case are grouped in a single device.
>
> Note that I then have another issue because the kernel doesn't support
> irq controllers on PCI and this is exactly what my SoC has. But for now,
> I can just duplicate the irqchip driver in the MFD driver.
>
> > This whole thing started when Intel first proposed to directly create
> > platform_device's in their ethernet driver and Greg had a quite strong
> > NAK to that.
>
> Let me point to drivers/net/ethernet/cadence/macb_pci.c which is a
> fairly recent example. It does exactly that and I'm not sure you could
> do it otherwise while still not having to duplicate most of macb_probe.
>

This still feels an orthogonal example to the problem auxiliary-bus is
solving. If a platform-device and a pci-device surface an IP with a
shared programming model that's an argument for a shared library, like
libata to house the commonality. In contrast auxiliary-bus is a
software model for software-defined sub-functionality to be wrapped in
a driver model. It assumes a parent-device / parent-driver hierarchy
that platform-bus and pci-bus do not imply.