[U-Boot] [PATCH v3 15/16] dm: Add README for driver model

[Simon Glass]

From: Pavel Herrmann <morpheus.ibis at gmail.com>

This adds a README to help with understanding of this series.

Signed-off-by: Simon Glass <sjg at chromium.org>
---
Changes in v3:
- Updated README.txt to cover changes since version 2

Changes in v2:
- Removed pointer return values in favour of integer
- Use driver_bind() in dm_init() instead of writing new code
- Allow driver_bind() to support a NULL parent
- Add dm_warn() to warn about impending doom
- Standardise variable names (e.g. uclass instead of class)
- Remove relocation functions
- Add new header file for lists
- Add new util file to hold utility functions
- Allow a driver to bind to only one uclass
- Remove unneeded arguments to uclass_bind(), uclass_unbind()
- Rename struct device's 'bus' to 'parent'
- Rename data structures to hopefully be clearer
- Put platform_data definitions in their own header file
- Add U_BOOT_DEVICE to declare platform_data
- Add auto-probing feature for platform_data to avoid driver_bind() calls
- Add simple unit test functions
- Add test infrastructure for driver model
- Add integration tests for driver model
- Add device tree support in driver model
- Add automatic allocation of platform_data for FDT
- Add automatic allocation of priv data for devices
- Add automatic allocation of device-specific priv data for uclasses
- Add GPIO uclass and tests
- Add sandbox GPIO driver
- Update gpio command to use driver model
- Add tests for core code
- Add script to run tests
- Add a single include/dm.h to bring in driver model code

 doc/driver-model/README.txt | 320 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 320 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 doc/driver-model/README.txt

diff --git a/doc/driver-model/README.txt b/doc/driver-model/README.txt
new file mode 100644
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+++ b/doc/driver-model/README.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,320 @@
+Driver Model
+============
+
+This README contains high-level information about driver model, a unified
+way of declaring and accessing drivers in U-Boot. The original work was done
+by:
+
+   Marek Vasut <marex at denx.de>
+   Pavel Herrmann <morpheus.ibis at gmail.com>
+   Viktor Křivák <viktor.krivak at gmail.com>
+   Tomas Hlavacek <tmshlvck at gmail.com>
+
+This has been both simplified and extended into the current implementation
+by:
+
+   Simon Glass <sjg at chromium.org>
+
+
+Terminology
+-----------
+
+Uclass - a group of device which operate in the same way. A uclass provides
+	a way of accessing invidual devices within the group, but always
+	using the same interface. For example a GPIO uclass provides
+	operations for get/set value. An I2C uclass may have 10 I2C ports,
+	4 with one driver, and 6 with another.
+
+Driver - some code which talks to a peripheral and presents a higher-level
+	interface to it.
+
+Device - an instance of a driver, tied to a particular port or peripheral.
+
+
+How to try it
+-------------
+
+Build U-Boot sandbox and run it:
+
+   make sandbox_config
+   make
+   ./u-boot
+
+   (type 'reset' to exit U-Boot)
+
+
+There is a uclass called 'demo'. This uclass handles
+saying hello, and reporting its status. There are two drivers in this
+uclass:
+
+   - simple: Just prints a message for hello, doesn't implement status
+   - shape: Prints shapes and reports number of characters printed as status
+
+The demo class is pretty simple, but not trivial. The intention is that it
+can be used for testing, so it will implement all driver model features and
+provide 100% code coverage of them. It does have multiple drivers, it
+handles parameter data and platform_data (data which tells the driver how
+to operate on a particular platform) and it uses private driver data.
+
+To try it, see the example session below:
+
+=>demo hello 1
+Hello '@' from 07981110: red 4
+=>demo status 2
+Status: 0
+=>demo hello 2
+g
+r@
+e@@
+e@@@
+n@@@@
+g@@@@@
+=>demo status 2
+Status: 21
+=>demo hello 4 ^
+  y^^^
+ e^^^^^
+l^^^^^^^
+l^^^^^^^
+ o^^^^^
+  w^^^
+=>demo status 4
+Status: 36
+=>
+
+
+Running the tests
+-----------------
+
+The intent with driver model is that the core portion has 100% test coverage
+in sandbox, and every uclass has its own test. As a move towards this, tests
+are provided in test/dm. To run them, try:
+
+   ./test/dm/test-dm.sh
+
+
+What is going on?
+-----------------
+
+Let's start at the top. The demo command is in common/cmd_demo.c. It does
+the usual command procesing and then:
+
+	struct device *demo_dev;
+
+	ret = uclass_get_device(UCLASS_DEMO, &demo_dev);
+
+UCLASS_DEMO means the class of devices which implement 'demo'. Other
+classes might be MMC, or GPIO, hashing or serial. The idea is that the
+devices in the class all share a particular way of working. The class
+presents a unified view of all these devices to U-Boot.
+
+This function looks up the device for the demo uclass. Given a device
+number we can find the device because all devices have registered with
+the UCLASS_DEMO uclass.
+
+Having found the device, we activate it with:
+
+	ret = driver_activate(demo_dev);
+
+This is because all devices are inactive until used in U-Boot. The exact
+mechanism of activating a driver will hopefully change. For example, i
+may be possible to combine uclass_get_child() and driver_activate().
+
+Now that we have the device we can do things like:
+
+	return demo_hello(demo_dev, ch);
+
+This function is in the demo uclass. It takes care of calling the 'hello'
+method of the relevant driver. Bearing in mind that there are two drivers,
+this particular device may use one or other of them.
+
+The code for demo_hello() is in drivers/demo/demo-uclass.c:
+
+int demo_hello(struct device *dev, int ch)
+{
+	const struct demo_ops *ops = device_get_ops(dev);
+
+	if (!ops->hello)
+		return -ENOSYS;
+
+	return ops->hello(dev, ch);
+}
+
+As you can see it just calls the relevant driver method. One of these is
+in drivers/demo/demo-simple.c:
+
+static int simple_hello(struct device *dev, int ch)
+{
+	const struct dm_demo_pdata *pdata = dev->platform_data;
+
+	printf("Hello from %08x: %s %d\n", map_to_sysmem(dev),
+	       pdata->colour, pdata->sides);
+
+	return 0;
+}
+
+
+So that is a trip from top to bottom but it leaves a lot of topics to
+address.
+
+
+Declaring Drivers
+-----------------
+
+A driver declaration looks something like this (see
+drivers/demo/demo-shape.c):
+
+static const struct demo_ops simple_ops = {
+	.hello = shape_hello,
+	.status = shape_status,
+};
+
+U_BOOT_DRIVER(demo_shape_drv) = {
+	.name	= "demo_shape_drv",
+	.id	= UCLASS_DEMO,
+	.ops	= &simple_ops,
+	.priv_data_size = sizeof(struct shape_data),
+};
+
+
+This driver has two methods (hello and status) and requires a bit
+of private data (accessible through dev->priv once the driver has
+been probed). It is a member of UCLASS_DEMO so will register itself
+there.
+
+In U_BOOT_DRIVER it is also possible to specify special methods for probe,
+and bind, and these are called at appropriate times. For many drivers
+it is hoped that only 'probe' and 'remove' will be needed.
+
+The U_BOOT_DRIVER macro creates a data structure accessible from C,
+so driver model can find the drivers that are available.
+
+
+Platform Data
+-------------
+
+Where does the platform data come from? See demo-pdata.c which
+sets up a table of driver names and their associated platform data.
+The data can be interpreted by the drivers however they like - it is
+basically a communication scheme between the board-specific code and
+the generic drivers, which are intended to work on any board.
+
+Drivers can acceess their data via dev->info->platform_data. Here is
+the declaration for the platform data, which would normally appear
+in the board file.
+
+	static const struct dm_demo_cdata red_square = {
+		.colour = "red",
+		.sides = 4.
+	};
+	static const struct driver_info info[] = {
+		{
+			.name = "demo_shape_drv",
+			.platform_data = &red_square,
+		},
+	};
+
+	demo1 = driver_bind(root, &info[0]);
+
+
+Device Tree
+-----------
+
+While platform_data is useful, a more flexible way of providing device data is
+by using device tree. With device tree we replace the above code with the
+following device treefragment:
+
+	red-square {
+		compatible = "demo-shape";
+		colour = "red";
+		sides = <4>;
+	};
+
+
+The easiest way to make this work it to add a platform_data_size member to
+the driver:
+
+	.platform_data_auto_alloc_size = sizeof(struct dm_test_pdata),
+
+This will be allocated and zeroed before the driver's probe method is called.
+The driver can then read the information out of the device tree and put it
+in dev->priv, typically using a ..._parse_dt() function.
+
+
+Declaring Uclasses
+------------------
+
+The demo uclass is declared like this:
+
+U_BOOT_CLASS(demo) = {
+	.id		= UCLASS_DEMO,
+};
+
+It is also possible to specify special methods for probe, etc. The uclass
+numbering comes from include/dm/uclass.h. To add a new uclass, add to the
+end of the enum there, then declare your uclass as above.
+
+
+Data Structures
+---------------
+
+Driver model uses a doubly-linked list as the basic data structure. Some
+nodes have several lists running through them. Creating a more efficient
+data structure might be worthwhile in some rare cases, once we understand
+what the bottlenecks are.
+
+
+Changes since v1
+----------------
+
+For the record, this implementation uses a very similar approach to the
+original patches, but makes at least the following changes:
+
+- Tried to agressively remove boilerplate, so that for most drivers there
+is little or no 'driver model' code to write.
+- Moved some data from code into data structure - e.g. store a pointer to
+the driver operations structure in the driver, rather than passing it
+to the driver bind function.
+- Rename some structures to make them more similar to Linux (struct device
+instead of struct instance, struct platform_data, etc.)
+- Change the name 'core' to 'uclass', meaning U-Boot class. It seems that
+this concept relates to a class of drivers (or a subsystem). We shouldn't
+use 'class' since it is a C++ reserved word, so U-Boot class (uclass) seems
+better than 'core'.
+- Remove 'struct driver_instance' and just use a single 'struct device'.
+This removes a level of indirection that doesn't seem necessary.
+- Built in device tree support, to avoid the need for platform_data
+- Removed the concept of driver relocation, and just make it possible for
+the new driver (created after relocation) to access the old driver data.
+I feel that relocation is a very special case and will only apply to a few
+drivers, many of which can/will just re-init anyway. So the overhead of
+dealing with this might not be worth it.
+- Implemented a GPIO system, trying to keep it simple
+
+
+Things to punt for later
+------------------------
+
+- SPL support - this will have to be present before many drivers can be
+converted, but it seems like we can add it once we are happy with the
+core implementation.
+- Pre-relocation support - similar story
+
+That is not to say that no thinking has gone into these - in fact there
+is quite a lot there. However, getting these right is non-trivial and
+there is a high cost associated with going down the wrong path.
+
+For SPL, it may be possible to fit in a simplified driver model with only
+bind and probe methods, to reduce size.
+
+For pre-relocation we can simply call the driver model init function. Then
+post relocation we throw that away and re-init driver model again. For drivers
+which require some sort of continuity between pre- and post-relocation
+devices, we can provide access to the pre-relocatoin device pointers.
+
+
+Simon Glass
+sjg at chromium.org
+April 2013
+Updated 7-May-13
+Updated 14-Jun-13
-- 
1.8.3