OF_DYNAMIC node lifecycle

[Nathan Fontenot]

On 06/27/2014 07:40 AM, Pantelis Antoniou wrote:
> Hi Grant,
> 
> On Jun 27, 2014, at 3:32 PM, Grant Likely wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, 26 Jun 2014 14:59:31 -0500, Nathan Fontenot <nfont at austin.ibm.com> wrote:
>>> On 06/25/2014 03:22 PM, Grant Likely wrote:
>>>> On Tue, 24 Jun 2014 15:07:05 -0500, Nathan Fontenot <nfont at austin.ibm.com> wrote:
>>>>> On 06/23/2014 09:58 AM, Grant Likely wrote:
>>>>>> On Thu, 19 Jun 2014 11:33:20 +0300, Pantelis Antoniou <pantelis.antoniou at konsulko.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> Hi Grant,
>>>>>>>
> 
> [snip]
> 
>>>
>>> This would affect property updates. When doing a property update the
>>> notifier passes a pointer to a struct containing a device node
>>> pointer and a pointer to the new device node property.
>>>
>>> I know specifically in memory property updates we grab the current version
>>> of the device tree property and compare it to the 'new' version that 
>>> was passed to us.
>>>
>>> If you want to do the DT update before calling the notifier that should be
>>> fine for the memory update code and would only require very minimal
>>> updates.
>>
>> We could change the notifier to include both the old and new values.
>>
>> I've been thinking about changing the notifier format anyway. With the
>> addition of bulk changes, it would be more efficient to send a single
>> notifier for all the changes with a link to the change set instead of
>> one at a time.
>>
> 
> That one has my vote. We also need a bulk change notifier, and for device
> driver use, some kind of wrapper for specific node/properties.
> 
> At the moment a notification is fired for any change in the tree, we might
> work something more fine-grained. Like 'watch this node & subnodes', or
> 'watch this property (or set of properties)'
> 

Both of these updates would work.

For property updates the only real requirement is that we can get to the new
and the old version of the property value.

I like the idea of being able to watch a single node/property. My experience
is that most code is only interested in updates to a single node or
property. Being able to avoid notifying everyone that has registered a
notifier for DT updates for every change would be nice.

-Nathan
-Nathan