Meaning of clk_round_rate()?

From: Stephen Boyd
Date: Wed Jul 14 2010 - 14:06:07 EST


What is the meaning of clk_round_rate() in the clk API (include/linux/clk.h)? The function documentation says "adjust a rate to the exact rate a clock can provide". That seems pretty vague. I'm lead to believe that it rounds the rate to the closest rate supported. Is that correct? Is there some sort of error margin where beyond that it's no longer possible to be rounded? 0.5%? 1%?

Assuming it's doing closest matching, I don't see how it's very useful in practice. Some users of clk_round_rate() are blindly searching up and down in the frequency space until they find a suitable rate (see sound/atmel/abdac.c and sound/spi/at73c213.c). These drivers might be better served by something like a clk_round_rate_up() and a clk_round_rate_down() which would round the rate to the nearest higher and lower frequency respectively without requiring complex loops around clk_round_rate().

In addition, an up/down rounding approach would make it simpler for drivers to find a min/max rate (for example display panels have a max frequency they can support).

A similar approach was suggested by David Brownell [1] but nothing came of it.

[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ports.arm.kernel/38076

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