Hi Hans, I’m going to commend only on the overlay related parts since I’m not I get all the nuances right.
> On Jun 19, 2016, at 14:06 , Hans de Goede <[email protected]> wrote: > > <resend with Pantelis' email address fixed> > > Hi All, > > The sunxi support in the kernel supports (amongst many other devices) the > quite > popular low cost q8 form factor 7" tablets. > > These are all based on the same case, with an allwinner SoC inside (there > are non allwinner versions, but those are out of scope) and typically all > based on > the same reference design. > > Currently we support any such tablet with 4 u-boot defconfigs / 4 dts files: > > q8_a13_tablet > q8_a23_tablet_800x480 > q8_a33_tablet_800x480 > q8_a33_tablet_1026x600 > > So all the user needs to know to get mainline running on these is which SoC > his > tablet is using and which resolution his lcd has. > > However the reference design gets completed by the manufacturers with whatever > accelerometer, wifi chip and touchscreen controller are cheapest for the batch > being produced that week. > > The plan is (was ?) to use auto-detection to figure out which components are > used and adjust the dts using e.g. overlays. > > Recently I've been working together with some students from my local > university > to get a driver for the gsl1680 touchscreen controller used in most of these > tablets upstream. > > So now I've been testing the touschscreen on all q8 tablets I own and > unfortunately things are not so easy. The gsl1680 is quite flexible, it > features > a number of capacitive sense pins and these can be routed in random order to > sense lines in the display, during init the controller gets feed a > configuration > data file with which pins go where and various lookup tables. > > Here is a table of all tablets I've tested: > > a13-94v-0: a082 a23-tj-a23-q88-v4.0_20140815/GSL1680E_700_FW.fw > 1024x600 inverted-x > a13-tzx-713b-v2.1: a082 a23-tj-a23-q88-v4.0_20140815/GSL1680E_700_FW.fw > 1024x600 > a23-q8h-v3: a082 a23-tj-a23-q88-v4.0_20140815/GSL1688_A70_FW.fw > 800x480 swapped-x-y > a23-tj-a23-q88-v4.0: a082 a23-tj-a23-q88-v4.0_20140815/GSL1680E_700_FW.fw > 1024x600 > a23-ippo-q8h-v1.2: a082 a23-tj-a23-q88-v4.0_20140815/GSL1688_A70_FW.fw > 800x480 swapped-x-y > a33-ippo-q8h-v1.2: a082 a23-tj-a23-q88-v4.0_20140815/GSL1688_A70_FW.fw > 800x480 swapped-x-y > a33-tzx-723q4: b482 a33-Q8_V2.4_1118/GSL1680_FW_D702.fw > 960x480 inverted-x > a33-q8-v2.4-1118: b482 a33-Q8_V2.4_1118/GSL1680_FW_D702.fw > 960x480 > a33-q8h-v1.5: b482 a33-q8h-v1.5/GSL1688_A70_FW.fw > 960x480 > > > The first column is <soc>-<pcb-marking>, the second is the chip-id from the > gsl1680 (this can be read > via i2c), the third column is the configdata file used for testing, the > directory-name it is prefixed > with is from which board's android image the firmware file was extracted. The > 4th column shows > the resolution of the reported coordinates and any necessary flags. > > Note that the resolution and if we need swapped-x-y actually is fixed for a > given fw file, so > we need to keep this information paired. > > So as you can see which fw file to use, and whether x is inverted or not vary > from board to board. > > This leaves us with 2 options: > > 1) Move to 1 dts file per PCB variant solution, of ALL the q8 tablets I've > seen I've only ever > had 2 with identical PCB-s and those were from the same batch, so this seems > unmaintainable. > Which leaves us with: > Yeah, you’re going to be fighting a losing battle. > 2) Give the user some way to override the dts settings. > > Which after a somewhat long intro brings me to the actual purpose of this > thread, discuss > how to best deal with this. I again see 2 options: > > 1) Put a disabled gsl1680 node in the dts file, have a q8_autodetect.c in > u-boot > which probes i2c and if it finds the gsl1680 nodes enables it, and patches in > a best-effort > default for which fw file to use. Allow the user to set a touchscreen_fw > u-boot env > variable which will override this. Also allow the user to set a > touchscreen_inverted_x env > variable to add inverted-x to the dt node for the gsl1680. > That can work. The problem is that having anything requiring smarts in u-boot always leads to trouble with users. It all depends on your user’s technical proficiency, if they are comfortable tweaking things in u-boot it’s fine. If it’s not, expect lots of bricked boards when they mess up. > 2) Write an in kernel overlay manager which does auto-detect as described by > 1, and > loads an overlay for the detected touchscreen controller, with module options > to allow > specifying the fw-file, x-inversion, etc. > > One things which worries me about 2. is that we would need to have 2 overlay > files > per fw-file, one regular config, one inverted-x, or is it possible for the > overlay > manager to modify an overlay before applying it ? > Yes, it’s quite possible. You can even have stacked overlays. > I tend towards doing the auto-detect in u-boot, since that will give the > greatest > flexibility (the dtb is fully read-writable in u-boot) and I can easily access > things like i2c-busses, soc id/version register, etc. there. > u-boot will work, but you will get into trouble if you demand users to drop to u-boot to make changes. > But before sinking a lot of time in either one of these I first wanted to > discuss > this, if the consensus is that an in kernel overlay manager is the way to go > I will take a shot at that instead. > > Regards, > > Hans Regards — Pantelis -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "linux-sunxi" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
