Subject: [PATCH v7 3/8] cpufreq: kirkwood: Remove use of the clk provider API

From: [email-masked] (Andrew Lunn)
Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 22:11:12 +0200

> Thanks for reviewing. I think my patch is equivalent to the old way of
> doing things, with one exception that I will address later below.
> 
> struct cpufreq_frequency_table kirkwood_freq_table has clock rates
> initialized to zero, so there is no regression compared to my unsigned
> long cpu_frequency variable used for tracking the clock rate. Both
> implementations start with unknown rates in hardware and initialize a
> variable to zero until that rate can be discovered later on in
> kirkwood_cpufreq_probe().
> 
> kirkwood_cpufreq_get_cpu_frequency() returns the frequency based on the
> state of the clock. As best I can tell, this clock is only touched by
> this cpufreq driver and nowhere else

Not quite true. u-boot might of touch the clock. Weird things happen
with some kirkwood boards. Some don't have the ability to control
there power supplies. So some boards implement "power off" by
rebooting, and letting u-boot spin until a button is pressed. I hope
such a u-boot powers off as much as possible, and e.g. drops the CPU
clock to the lower frequency. One would also hope it puts it back to
high speed before calling the kernel.

There is also the somewhat unlikely case that somebody uses kexec to
go from one kernel to another. You have no idea what state the
previous kernel left the clock in.

> , so the driver knows the state of
> the clock implicitly and doesn't need to read any hardware registers to
> see if it is enabled or not. Every time we enable or disable the clock
> we can know the cpu frequency.
> 
> > 
> > However, if you don't cause an actual state change, the WFI never
> > returns. If this assumption is wrong, your box is dead the first time
> > it tries to change cpu frequency.
> 
> So if a state change in hardware never occurs, the cpu will not wake up?

Correct. I had that situation a few times while developing this
driver. And it is not obvious what has happened, since it does not
happen immediately, but when the governor decides the CPU load passes
a threshold and the frequency can be changed. I had it stop dead while
i assume it executed some sleep in an /etc/init.d script.

> That sounds like a bad situation but I do not understand how it relates
> to the changes I made in the driver. Could you explain how tracking
> cpu_frequency in the driver would result in the cpu not waking up from
> wfi?

It was clearer in earlier versions of the driver, but code has been
refactored into the cpufreq core. The core should call
kirkwood_cpufreq_get_cpu_frequency() in order to get the current
frequency, and only perform a change if the requested frequency is
different. In the current code, kirkwood_cpufreq_get_cpu_frequency()
reads from the hardware what the current frequency is. So we are
guaranteed to only call kirkwood_cpufreq_target() when there is a real
change.

[snip]

> Can the driver's
> view of the clock status be out of sync with the actual hardware?

Yes, at startup, as explained above, we have no idea what the current
state of the hardware is. Once we do know the real state, we can track
it within the driver, but we need to get that initial state correct,
or we WFI forever on the first frequency change.

   Andrew