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authorDouglas Anderson <dianders@chromium.org>2023-07-27 10:16:30 -0700
committerDouglas Anderson <dianders@chromium.org>2023-08-01 07:38:13 -0700
commitde0874165b830c2b08abe87f4ffc6908f2a00cf0 (patch)
treefa9438202717c0c823716c51ef9e4693b4374f8d /mm/vmpressure.c
parentd2aacaf07395bd798373cbec6af05fff4147aff3 (diff)
drm/panel: Add a way for other devices to follow panel state
These days, it's fairly common to see panels that have touchscreens attached to them. The panel and the touchscreen can somewhat be thought of as totally separate devices and, historically, this is how Linux has treated them. However, treating them as separate isn't necessarily the best way to model the two devices, it was just that there was no better way. Specifically, there is little practical reason to have the touchscreen powered on when the panel is turned off, but if we model the devices separately we have no way to keep the two devices' power states in sync with each other. The issue described above makes it sound as if the problem here is just about efficiency. We're wasting power keeping the touchscreen powered up when the screen is off. While that's true, the problem can go deeper. Specifically, hardware designers see that there's no reason to have the touchscreen on while the screen is off and then build hardware assuming that software would never turn the touchscreen on while the screen is off. In the very simplest case of hardware designs like this, the touchscreen and the panel share some power rails. In most cases, this turns out not to be terrible and is, again, just a little less efficient. Specifically if we tell Linux that the touchscreen and the panel are using the same rails then Linux will keep the rails on when _either_ device is turned on. That ends to work OK-ish, but now if you turn the panel off not only will the touchscreen remain powered, but the power rails for the panel itself won't be switched off, burning extra power. The above two inefficiencies are _extra_ minor when you consider the fact that laptops rarely spend much time with the screen off. The main use case would be when an external screen (and presumably a power supply) is attached. Unfortunately, it gets worse from here. On sc7180-trogdor-homestar, for instance, the display's TCON (timing controller) sometimes crashes if you don't power cycle it whenever you stop and restart the video stream (like during a modeset). The touchscreen keeping the power rails on causes real problems. One proposal in the homestar timeframe was to move the touchscreen to an always-on rail, dedicating the main power rail to the panel. That caused _different_ problems as talked about in commit 557e05fa9fdd ("HID: i2c-hid: goodix: Stop tying the reset line to the regulator"). The end result of all of this was to add an extra regulator to the board, increasing cost. Recently, Cong Yang posted a patch [1] where things are even worse. The panel and touch controller on that system seem even more intimately tied together and really can't be thought of separately. To address this issue, let's start allowing devices to register themselves as "panel followers". These devices will get called after a panel has been powered on and before a panel is powered off. This makes the panel the primary device in charge of the power state, which matches how userspace uses it. The panel follower API should be fairly straightforward to use. The current code assumes that panel followers are using device tree and have a "panel" property pointing to the panel to follow. More flexibility and non-DT implementations could be added as needed. Right now, panel followers can follow the prepare/unprepare functions. There could be arguments made that, instead, they should follow enable/disable. I've chosen prepare/unprepare for now since those functions are guaranteed to power up/power down the panel and it seems better to start the process earlier. A bit of explaining about why this is a roll-your-own API instead of using something more standard: 1. In standard APIs in Linux, parent devices are automatically powered on when a child needs power. Applying that here, it would mean that we'd force the panel on any time someone was listening to the touchscreen. That, unfortunately, would have broken homestar's need (if we hadn't changed the hardware, as per above) where the panel absolutely needs to be able to power cycle itself. While one could argue that homestar is broken hardware and we shouldn't have the API do backflips for it, _officially_ the eDP timing guidelines agree with homestar's needs and the panel power sequencing diagrams show power going off. It's nice to be able to support this. 2. We could, conceibably, try to add a new flag to device_link causing the parent to be in charge of power. Then we could at least use normal pm_runtime APIs. This sounds great, except that we run into problems with initial probe. As talked about in the later patch ("HID: i2c-hid: Support being a panel follower") the initial power on of a panel follower might need to do things (like add sub-devices) that aren't allowed in a runtime_resume function. The above complexities explain why this API isn't using common functions. That being said, this patch is very small and self-contained, so if someone was later able to adapt it to using more common APIs while solving the above issues then that could happen in the future. [1] https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230519032316.3464732-1-yangcong5@huaqin.corp-partner.google.com Reviewed-by: Maxime Ripard <mripard@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Douglas Anderson <dianders@chromium.org> Link: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/msgid/20230727101636.v4.3.Icd5f96342d2242051c754364f4bee13ef2b986d4@changeid
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