Hi Sean,
On Thu, 27 Jan 2022 at 08:43, Sean Anderson seanga2@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/27/22 10:05 AM, Simon Glass wrote:
Hi Sean,
On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 at 15:25, Sean Anderson seanga2@gmail.com wrote:
When freeing a clock there is not much we can do if there is an error, and most callers do not actually check the return value. Even e.g. checking to make sure that clk->id is valid should have been done in request() in the first place (unless someone is messing with the driver behind our back). Just return void and don't bother returning an error.
Signed-off-by: Sean Anderson seanga2@gmail.com
drivers/clk/clk-uclass.c | 7 +++---- drivers/clk/clk_sandbox.c | 6 +++--- include/clk-uclass.h | 8 +++----- 3 files changed, 9 insertions(+), 12 deletions(-)
We have the same thing in other places too, but I am a little worried about removing error checking. We try to avoid checking arguments too much in U-Boot, due to code-size concerns, so I suppose I agree that an invalid clk should be caught by a debug assertion rather than a full check. But with driver model we have generally added an error return to every uclass method, for consistency and to permit returning error information if needed.
Regards, Simon
So there are a few reasons why I don't think a return value is useful here. To illustrate this, consider a typical user of the clock API:
struct clk a, b; ret = clk_get_by_name(dev, "a", &a); if (ret) return ret; ret = clk_get_by_name(dev, "b", &b); if (ret) goto free_a; ret = clk_set_rate(&a, 5000000); if (ret) goto free_b; ret = clk_enable(&b);free_b: clk_free(&b); free_a: clk_free(&a); return ret;
- Because a and b are "thick pointers" they do not need any cleanup to free their own resources. The only cleanup might be if the clock driver has allocated something in clk_request (more on this below)
- By the time we call clk_free, the mutable portions of the function have already completed. In effect, the function has succeeded, regardless of whether clk_free fails. Additionally, we cannot take any action if it fails, since we still have to free both clocks.
- clk_free occurs during the error path of the function. Even if it errored, we do not want to override the existing error from one of the functions doing "real" work.
The last thing is that no clock driver actually does anything in rfree. The only driver with this function is the sandbox driver. I would like to remove the function altogether. As I understand it, the existing API is inspired by the reset drivers, so I would like to review its usage in the reset subsystem before removing it for the clock subsystem. I also want to make some changes to how rates and enables/disables are calculated which might provide a case for rfree. But once that is complete I think there will be no users still.
What does this all look like in Linux?
Regards, Simon