Re: [PATCH v6 5/9] dt-bindings: ARM: document marvell,ecc-enable binding

From: Arnd Bergmann
Date: Fri Nov 09 2018 - 10:58:44 EST


On Fri, Nov 9, 2018 at 12:48 PM Russell King - ARM Linux
<linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Nov 09, 2018 at 12:40:06PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 9, 2018 at 8:04 AM Chris Packham
> > <chris.packham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > Add documentation for the marvell,ecc-enable and marvell,ecc-disable
> > > properties which can be used to enable/disable ECC on the Marvell aurora
> > > cache.
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Chris Packham <chris.packham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > > ---
> >
> > Why do you need both enable and disable? Wouldn't one of them be enough here?
>
> It isn't an "on when ecc-enable is present, off when not" because the
> current behaviour is to preserve these bits in the control register.
>
> If we were to implement it as "if no ecc-enable property, turn off
> ECC" then that would drastically change the behaviour - systems which
> were configured for ECC suddenly lose ECC support.
>
> Since we don't know which have it and which don't, we can't implement
> the option like that.

What I meant was why we need support force-disabling it. I understand
that we need to allow leaving it at the boot-time default as well as
force-enabling it.

Arnd