Re: [PATCH v2 4/4] drm/panel-edp: Add some panels with conservative timings

[Doug Anderson]

Hi,

On Wed, Dec 13, 2023 at 7:34 AM Maxime Ripard <mripard@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > > > Repeating my comments from v1 here too, since I expect this patch to
> > > > sit on the lists for a little while:
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > This is OK w/ me, but it will need time on the mailing lists before
> > > > landing in case anyone else has opinions.
> > >
> > > Generally speaking, I'm not really a fan of big patches that dump
> > > whatever ChromeOS is doing ...
> > >
> > > > Specifical thoughts:
> > > >
> > > > * I at least feel fairly confident that this is OK since these panels
> > > > essentially booted without _any_ delays back on the old downstream
> > > > v4.19 kernel. Presumably the panels just had fairly robust timing
> > > > controllers and so worked OK, but it's better to get the timing more
> > > > correct.
> > >
> > > ... especially since you have to rely on the recollection of engineers
> > > involved at the time and you have no real way to test and make things
> > > clearer anymore, and we have to take patches in that are handwavy "trust
> > > us, it's doing the right thing".
> > >
> > > I'd really prefer to have these patches sent as they are found out.
> >
> > It's probably not clear enough from the commit message, but this isn't
> > just a dump from downstream 4.19. What happened was:
> >
> > 1. Downstream chromeos-4.19 used the "little white lie" approach. They
> > all claimed a specific panel's compatible string even though there
> > were a whole pile of panels out there actually being used. Personally,
> > this was not something I was ever a fan of (and I wasn't personally
> > involved in this project), but it was the "state of the art" before
> > the generic panel-edp. Getting out of the "little white lie" situation
> > was why I spent so much time on the generic edp-panel solution
> > upstream.
> >
> > 2. These devices have now been uprevved to a newer kernel and I
> > believe that there were issues seen that necessitated a move to the
> > proper generic panel-edp code.
> >
> > 3. We are now getting field reports from our warning collector about a
> > whole pile of panels that are falling back to the "conservative"
> > timings, which means that they turn on/off much more slowly than they
> > should.
> >
> > Pin-yen made an attempt to search for panels data sheets that matched
> > up with the IDs that came in from the field reports but there were
> > some panels that he just couldn't find.
> >
> > So basically we're stuck. Options:
> >
> > 1. Leave customers who have these panels stuck with the hardware
> > behaving worse than it used to. This is not acceptable to me.
> >
> > 2. Land Pin-yen's patch as a downstream-only patch in ChromeOS. This
> > would solve the problem, but it would make me sad. If anyone ever
> > wants to take these old laptops and run some other Linux distribution
> > on them (and there are several that target old Chromebooks) then
> > they'd be again stuck with old timings.
> >
> > 3. Land a patch like this one that at least gets us into not such a bad shape.
> >
> > While I don't love this patch (and that's why I made it clear that it
> > needs to spend time on the list), it seems better than the
> > alternatives. Do you have a proposal for something else? If not, can
> > you confirm you're OK with #3 given this explanation? ...and perhaps
> > more details in the commit message?
>
> I don't have a specific comment, it was more of a comment about the
> process itself, if you write down what's above in the commit message ...

Pin-yen: can you take a whack at summarizing some of the above in the
commit message and sending out a v3?