Re: [PATCH v5 6/6] soc: renesas: Add L2 cache management for RZ/Five SoC

[Lad, Prabhakar]

Hi Conor,

On Sat, Dec 17, 2022 at 10:52 PM Conor Dooley <conor@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Dec 16, 2022 at 09:04:20PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > On Fri, Dec 16, 2022, at 17:32, Palmer Dabbelt wrote:
> > > On Thu, 15 Dec 2022 23:02:58 PST (-0800), Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > >> On Thu, Dec 15, 2022 at 01:40:30PM -0800, Palmer Dabbelt wrote:
> > >>> Given that we already moved the SiFive one out it seems sane to just start
> > >>> with the rest in drivers/soc/$VENDOR.  Looks like it was Christoph's idea to
> > >>> do the move, so I'm adding him in case he's got an opinion (and also the SOC
> > >>> alias, as that seems generally relevant).
> > >>
> > >> Well, it isn't an integral architecture feature, so it doesn't really
> > >> beloing into arch.  Even the irqchip and timer drivers that are more
> > >> less architectural are in drivers/ as they aren't really core
> > >> architecture code.
> > >
> > > That makes sense to me, it just looks like the SiFive ccache is the only
> > > one that's in drivers/soc/$VENDOR, the rest are in arch.  It looks like
> > > mostly older ports that have vendor-specific cache files in arch (ie,
> > > arm has it but arm64 doesn't).  Maybe that's just because the newer
> > > architectures sorted out standard ISA interfaces for these and thus
> > > don't need the vendor-specific bits?  I think we're likely to end up
> > > with quite a few of these vendor-specific cache management schemes on
> > > RISC-V.
> > >
> > > I'm always happy to keep stuff out of arch/riscv, though.  So maybe we
> > > just buck the trend here and stick to drivers/soc/$VENDOR like we did
> > > for the first one?
> >
> > I don't particularly like drivers/soc/ to become more of a dumping
> > ground for random drivers. If there are several SoCs that have the
> > same requirement to do a particular thing, the logical step would
> > be to put them into a proper subsystem, with a well-defined interface
> > to dma-mapping and virtualization frameworks.
> >
> > The other things we have in drivers/soc/ are usually either
> > soc_device drivers for identifying the system, or they export
> > interfaces used by soc specific drivers.
>
> Sounds like that's two "not in my back yard" votes from the maintainers
> in question..
> Doing drivers/cache would allow us to co-locate the RISC-V cache
> management bits since it is not just going to be the ax45mp l2 driver
> that will need to have them.
>
> Would it be okay to put this driver in soc/andestech for now & then move
> it, and the SiFive one, once we've got patches posted for cache
> management with that?
>
I think to start with it would be better if we place the Andes cache
driver in the proposed "drivers/cache" folder. We would avoid
unnecessary movement of code?

Cheers,
Prabhakar