OF_DYNAMIC node lifecycle

[Nathan Fontenot]

On 07/16/2014 05:26 PM, Grant Likely wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 2:57 PM, Grant Likely <grant.likely at linaro.org> wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 12:30 PM, Tyrel Datwyler
>> <turtle.in.the.kernel at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 07/15/2014 10:33 PM, Grant Likely wrote:
>>>> I've got another question about powerpc reconfiguration. I was looking
>>>> at the dlpar_configure_connector() function in dlpar.c. I see that the
>>>> function has the ability to process multiple nodes with additional
>>>> sibling and child nodes. It appears to link them into a detached tree
>>>> structure, and the function returns a pointer to the first node.
>>>>
>>>> All of the callers of that function then call dlpar_attach_node(),
>>>> which calls of_attach_node(). However, of_attach_node() only handles a
>>>> single node. It doesn't handle siblings or children. Is this a bug?
>>>> Does the configure connector ever actually receive more than one node
>>>> at once?
>>>
>>> Yes, it is sometimes the case we will get a tree structure back of more
>>> than one node. Under the proc interface implementation this just worked.
>>> With the move to sysfs it appears we have a regression here. What makes
>>> more sense here, for us to walk the tree calling of_attach_node, or to
>>> move such tree walking logic into of_attach_node? From what I can tell
>>> we are the only consumers of of_attach_node.
>>
>> That is very shortly going to change. The overlay code also uses
>> of_attach_node(). I can make of_attach_node() recurse over
>> descendants, but I'm also considering moving the powerpc code over to
>> the of_changeset series that Panto and I are working on.
>>
>> Either way, the handling of multiple nodes should be common code. I
>> think the easiest is to put the recursion into of_attach_node(), at
>> least for fixing the bug. It can be reworked later.
> 
> On pseries, do notifiers ever fail? ie. Does the reconfig code ever
> object to a DT change and prevent it from being applied?
> 
I cannot think of a time that  I ever saw a notifier fail.

-Nathan