Re: [PATCH v3 2/7] bus: mhi: core: Introduce independent voting mechanism

From: bbhatt
Date: Wed May 20 2020 - 15:44:33 EST


On 2020-05-20 12:06, Jeffrey Hugo wrote:
On 5/20/2020 12:43 PM, bbhatt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On 2020-05-20 09:54, Jeffrey Hugo wrote:
On 5/18/2020 2:03 PM, Bhaumik Bhatt wrote:
Allow independent votes from clients such that they can choose to vote
for either the device or the bus or both. This helps in cases where the
device supports autonomous low power mode wherein it can move to M2
state without the need to notify the host. Clients can also vote only to
keep the underlying bus active without having the device in M0 state to
support offload use cases.

Signed-off-by: Bhaumik Bhatt <bbhatt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---

I wonder, why doesn't this fit with runtimePM?
Hi Jeff,

Can you elaborate?

In short, with this patch, MHI just wants to give controller the option to
choose the vote type so we can implement autonomous low power mode entries
on both host and device.

So, you are attempting to manage the power mode of the device. The
standard mechanism to do so in Linux is runtime pm.

https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/Documentation/driver-api/pm/devices.rst

I'm no runtime pm expert, but it feels like your whole voting
mechanism, etc is just reimplemeting that. Reimplementing the wheel,
when its been a standard thing that the majority of the kernel uses is
not usually acceptable.

IMO, you need some sort of justification why runtime pm is not
applicable for you, because I'm willing to bet Mani/Greg are going to
ask the same.
I think we can look at the patch as simply expanding the scope of what already exists.

The client here has been calling mhi_device_get/put/sync APIs to gain device vote and with
new features yet to come in, this introductory change is only re-purposing what voting
means going forward. i.e. allowing individual bus and device votes.

If you're suggesting using runtimePM APIs to replace the newly introduced bus vote, it
would be kind of overkill here IMO. Is that what you were getting at? Because currently,
we just have controllers use runtimePM and provide callbacks to them.

If you have ideas, we can discuss them.