On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 09:43:50PM +0100, Uwe Kleine-König wrote: > On Sun, Jan 03, 2021 at 06:04:10PM +0100, Clemens Gruber wrote: > > Another point is the period: Sven suggested we do not read out the > > period at all, as the PWM is disabled anyway (see above). > > Is this acceptable? > > In my eyes consumers should consider the period value as "don't care" if > the PWM is off. But this doesn't match reality (and maybe also it > doesn't match Thierry's opinion). See for example the > drivers/video/backlight/pwm_bl.c driver which uses the idiom: > > pwm_get_state(mypwm, &state); > state.enabled = true; > pwm_apply_state(pb->pwm, &state); > > which breaks if .period is invalid. (OK, this isn't totally accurate > because currently the .get_state callback has only little to do with > pwm_get_state(), but you get the point.)
The idea behind atomic states in the PWM API is to provide accurate snapshots of a PWM channel's settings. It's not a representation of the PWM channel's physical output, although in some cases they may be the same. However, there's no 1:1 correspondence between those two. For example, when looking purely at the physical output of a PWM it is in most cases not possible to make the distinction between these two states: - duty: 0 period: 100 - duty: 0 period: 200 Because the output will be a constant 0 (or 1, depending on polarity). However, given that we want a snapshot of the currently configured settings, we can't simply assume that there's a 1:1 correspondence and then use shortcuts to simplify the hardware state representation because it isn't going to be accurate. It is entirely expected that consumers will be able to use an existing atomic state, update it and then apply it without necessarily having to recompute the whole state. So what pwm-backlight is doing is expressly allowed (and in fact was one specific feature that we wanted to have in the atomic API). Similarly it's a valid use-case to do something like this: /* set duty cycle to 50% */ pwm_get_state(pwm, &state); state.duty_cycle = state.period / 2; pwm_apply_state(pwm, &state); which allows a consumer to do simple modifications without actually knowing what period has been configured. Some consumers just don't care about the period or don't even have a clue about what a good value would be (again, pwm-backlight would be one example). For some PWMs it may also not be possible to modify the period and if there's no explicit reason to do so, why should consumers be forced to even bother? All of that's out the window if we start taking shortcuts. If the PWM provider reads out the hardware state's PWM as "don't care", how is the consumer going to know what value to use? Yes, they can use things like pwm_get_args() to get the configuration from DT, but then what's the purpose of using states in the first place if consumers have to do all the tracking manually anyway? Thierry
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