Subject: COMMON_CLK_DISABLE_UNUSED

From: [email-masked] (Mike Turquette)
Date: Tue, 1 May 2012 15:44:35 -0700

On 20120410-08:36, Rob Herring wrote:
> On 04/09/2012 06:04 PM, Turquette, Mike wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 3:29 PM, Andrew Lunn <[email-masked]> wrote:
> >> I think it would be good to consider deleting this config option and
> >> just have the code always enabled.
> > 
> > I agree.  We already support the CLK_IGNORE_UNUSED flag, so any
> > platforms that don't want this functionality wholesale can set that
> > bit for every clock.
> > 
> > I'll pull out that option.
> > 
> 
> CLK_IGNORE_UNUSED looks a bit broken to me. If you don't have the flag
> set on the whole chain of parents, then a parent could be turned off.
> This could happen at boot time or when another child get disabled and
> the common parent's ref count goes to 0 and gets disabled.
> 
> I think a better solution would be a force enable or enable on boot flag
> that sets ref counts correctly. Otherwise, each platform has to call
> clk_prepare and clk_enable for all the clocks it wants to keep on.
> 
> Here's a simple case that needs work. You have a cpu clock controlled by
> cpufreq driver. If the cpufreq driver is not loaded, we want the cpu
> clock always enabled and don't want the clk infrastructure turning it
> off. If the cpufreq driver is loaded, then we potentially want it to be
> able to enable and disable the cpu clock if we switch parents. I guess
> the easiest solution is the cpufreq driver needs to assume the cpu clock
> is already enabled with a ref count of 1.
> 

Hi Rob,

Apologies for the late reply.

I think having any driver (including a cpufreq driver) assume anything
about the usecount is broken.  Most code should follow the
tried-and-true pattern:

clk_get()
clk_prepare()
clk_enable()

cpufreq is no exception to this pattern.  The only concern that has been
raised to date is that of "re-enabling" a clock that is already enabled
in hardware (which the cpufreq driver would do).  That case is only
theoretical and no platform that I am aware of has a problem re-setting
the bit to enable a clock (or i2c message, or whatever).

Thanks,
Mike

> Rob