[PATCH] dm: pinctrl: Revert "pinctrl: probe pinctrl drivers during post-bind"

[Simon Glass]

Hi Pali,

On Fri, 30 Dec 2022 at 09:53, Pali Rohár <pali at kernel.org> wrote:
>
> On Friday 30 December 2022 09:30:27 Simon Glass wrote:
> > Hi Pali,
> >
> > On Wed, 21 Dec 2022 at 17:02, Pali Rohár <pali at kernel.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Wednesday 21 December 2022 07:27:39 Simon Glass wrote:
> > > > This breaks chromebook_coral and it is also not how things should work. If
> > > > a board needs to bind GPIOs as part of a pinctrl driver this can be done
> > > > during the bind step, if needed.
> > > >
> > > > We cannot probe pinctrl devices when binding as a rule, since it cannot be
> > > > supported on some platforms.
> > > >
> > > > The bind and probe steps are separate in U-Boot and they should remain
> > > > separate.
> > > >
> > > > This reverts commit f9ec791b5e24378b71590877499f8683d5f54dac.
> > >
> > > Unfortunately reverting this patch would break other devices, mostly
> > > A3720 based where pinctrl driver acts also as gpio driver. Because no
> > > other caller then register gpio driver and so other drivers which parses
> > > gpios from DT (which belongs to that gpio driver) will fail during
> > > probe.
> >
> > That is something to be sorted out for that platform. You can bind
> > GPIO devices in the pinctrl driver's bind() method as other SoCs do.
> > Even better, the device tree typically has that info in it, i.e. GPIO
> > subnodes within the pinctrl node.
> >
> > Probing pinctrl in a bind function is unfortunately just wrong. It
> > will cause all sorts of problems, and perhaps already has.
>
> Ok, so it means that drivers/pinctrl/mvebu/pinctrl-armada-37xx.c needs
> to be refactored and fixed to handle these restrictions.

It is not a restriction. It is simply that binding and probing are
different things and we should not tie them together. It will just
become a nightmare for board bringup and other drivers.

>
> > > Also I think that pinctrl command would not work in this case if pinctrl
> > > would not be probed.
> >
> > Devices are probed before use, including by commands.
> >
> > This is quite important to fix before the release.
>
> Unfortunately in this time I do not have any a3720 board for testing.
> Robert was able to easily trigger this issue and also introduced that
> commit f9ec791b5e24 ("pinctrl: probe pinctrl drivers during post-bind").
>
> So may I ask Robert to look at it? In past days I looked at powerpc
> release issues and I do not have time for other things.

That driver has a few FIXMEs in it and could use a look anyway. I see
that the gpio controller is a subnode of pinctrl anyway. Adding a
compatible string for it would fix the problem  just like that, and
remove a lot of ugly code in the driver. This Linux-centric nature of
device tree bindings really is infuriating:

/* FIXME: Use livtree and check the result of device_bind() below */
fdt_for_each_subnode(subnode, blob, node) {
    if (fdtdec_get_bool(blob, subnode, "gpio-controller")) {
        ret = 0;
        break;
    }
};
if (ret)
   return ret;


Failing that it just needs a bind() method that calls
armada_37xx_gpiochip_register()

Regards,
Simon