Re: [RFC v2 0/5] cpufreq support for the Raspberry Pi

[Viresh Kumar]

On 20-05-19, 12:47, Nicolas Saenz Julienne wrote:
> Hi all,
> as some of you may recall I've been spending some time looking into
> providing 'cpufreq' support for the Raspberry Pi platform[1]. I think
> I'm close to something workable, so I'd love for you to comment on it.
> 
> There has been some design changes since the last version. Namely the
> fact that I now make sure *only* the CPU frequency is updated. The
> firmware API we use has two modes, with or without turbo. Enabling turbo
> implies not only scaling the CPU clock but also the VPU and other
> peripheral related clocks.  This is problematic as some of them are not
> prepared for this kind frequency changes. I spent some time adapting the
> peripheral drivers, but the result was disappointing as they poorly
> support live frequency changes (which most other chips accept, think for
> instance I2C and clock stretching) but also turned out hard to integrate
> into the kernel. As we were planning to use 'clk_notifiers' which turns
> out not to be such a good idea as it's prone to deadlocks and not
> recommended by the clock maintainers[2]. It's also worth mentioning that
> the foundation kernel doesn't support VPU frequency scaling either.
> 
> With this in mind, and as suggested by clock maintainers[2], I've
> decided to integrate the firmware clock interface into the bcm2835 clock
> driver. This, in my opinion, provides the least friction with the
> firmware and lets us write very simple and portable higher level
> drivers. As I did with the 'cpufreq' driver which simply queries the max
> and min frequencies available, which are configurable in the firmware,
> to then trigger the generic 'cpufreq-dt'.
> 
> In the future we could further integrate other firmware dependent clocks
> into the main driver. For instance to be able to scale the VPU clock,
> which should be operated through a 'devfreq' driver.
> 
> This was tested on a RPi3b+ and if the series is well received I'll test
> it further on all platforms I own.

Please always supply version history on what has changed from V1. And
why do you keep sending it as RFC ? Just keep the default PATCH thing,
the patches are in good shape I would say.

-- 
viresh