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authorSimon Glass <sjg@chromium.org>2014-07-23 06:55:03 -0600
committerSimon Glass <sjg@chromium.org>2014-07-23 14:07:24 +0100
commit00606d7e39da4a8ecfbbc19d5af252bdfdd1fcc9 (patch)
tree53f8d51b84e75120a3b673946e515ffcbe250ceb /doc
parent6133683320ece056e49051e52a180adb21992b40 (diff)
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dm: Allow drivers to be marked 'before relocation'
Driver model currently only operates after relocation is complete. In this state U-Boot typically has a small amount of memory available. In adding support for driver model prior to relocation we must try to use as little memory as possible. In addition, on some machines the memory has not be inited and/or the CPU is not running at full speed or the data cache is off. These can reduce execution performance, so the less initialisation that is done before relocation the better. An immediately-obvious improvement is to only initialise drivers which are actually going to be used before relocation. On many boards the only such driver is a serial UART, so this provides a very large potential benefit. Allow drivers to mark themselves as 'pre-reloc' which means that they will be initialised prior to relocation. This can be done either with a driver flag or with a 'dm,pre-reloc' device tree property. To support this, the various dm scanning function now take a 'pre_reloc_only' parameter which indicates that only drivers marked pre-reloc should be bound. Signed-off-by: Simon Glass <sjg@chromium.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'doc')
-rw-r--r--doc/driver-model/README.txt31
1 files changed, 19 insertions, 12 deletions
diff --git a/doc/driver-model/README.txt b/doc/driver-model/README.txt
index 22c3fcb..907ff67 100644
--- a/doc/driver-model/README.txt
+++ b/doc/driver-model/README.txt
@@ -95,26 +95,24 @@ are provided in test/dm. To run them, try:
You should see something like this:
<...U-Boot banner...>
- Running 12 driver model tests
+ Running 14 driver model tests
Test: dm_test_autobind
Test: dm_test_autoprobe
Test: dm_test_children
Test: dm_test_fdt
+ Test: dm_test_fdt_pre_reloc
Test: dm_test_gpio
sandbox_gpio: sb_gpio_get_value: error: offset 4 not reserved
Test: dm_test_leak
- Warning: Please add '#define DEBUG' to the top of common/dlmalloc.c
- Warning: Please add '#define DEBUG' to the top of common/dlmalloc.c
Test: dm_test_lifecycle
Test: dm_test_operations
Test: dm_test_ordering
Test: dm_test_platdata
+ Test: dm_test_pre_reloc
Test: dm_test_remove
Test: dm_test_uclass
Failures: 0
-(You can add '#define DEBUG' as suggested to check for memory leaks)
-
What is going on?
-----------------
@@ -538,26 +536,35 @@ dealing with this might not be worth it.
- Implemented a GPIO system, trying to keep it simple
+Pre-Relocation Support
+----------------------
+
+For pre-relocation we simply call the driver model init function. Only
+drivers marked with DM_FLAG_PRE_RELOC or the device tree
+'u-boot,dm-pre-reloc' flag are initialised prior to relocation. This helps
+to reduce the driver model overhead.
+
+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-relocation
+device pointers, but this is not currently implemented (the root device
+pointer is saved but not made available through the driver model API).
+
+
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
+That is not to say that no thinking has gone into this - 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-relocation device pointers.
-
Uclasses are statically numbered at compile time. It would be possible to
change this to dynamic numbering, but then we would require some sort of
lookup service, perhaps searching by name. This is slightly less efficient