Believe me, it is very useful in both BSP development and SOC power management. In the company I am working for, people are keen to have this kind of info.

On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 7:55 AM, Kevin Hilman <khilman@deeprootsystems.com> wrote:
Amit Kucheria <amit.kucheria@linaro.org> writes:

> Adding linaro-dev to cc. Kernel consolidation WG might have comments.
>
> On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 9:04 AM, Yong Shen <yong.shen@linaro.org> wrote:
>> Hi Amit and Jeremy,
>>
>> This is not a patch review. But patch may better present my idea. Basically,
>> I want to add some code in common clock code to export clock information, so
>> every platform can benefit. This information is present in a tree-like
>> pattern.
>> Currently, each platform uses their own way to show clock info, which is
>> hard to use a common user space tool to collect information.
>> For this purpose, I need do the rest:
>> 1. Add a clock name check in the clkdev_add. We don't accept two clocks with
>> the same name to clkdev_add, do we? otherwise, it is impossible to create a
>> tree-like structure under file system, cause no same names under a
>> directory.
>> 2. Recursive function creates the clock tree in debugfs, which referred
>> omap's clock implementation.
>> 3. Add interface needed to let mach related drivers to report their
>> information. clk_get_rate is already there. Maybe we need clk_get_flags()
>> and clk_get_usecount() and more.
>
> Agreed, this functionality is necessary for common clk infrastructure
> to be useful.
>
> We've also incorporated this functionality into a tool called
> powerdebug that'll show runtime state of the clock tree. This is very
> useful for driver developers.

IMO, I think this is going somewhat down the wrong path, at least in
terms of power management controls.

I know that most drivers assume that a clock is the primary PM "knob"
for a given device, but there is *lots* more to device PM than clocks.

For that reason, on OMAP, we are now moving all drivers to use the
runtime PM framework, so for power management drivers do not have to
know anything about their clocks, and as a result most drivers don't
have to know about *any* clocks.  They just use runtime PM 'get' and
'put' calls when they want the device to be active.

That being said, I'm not against $SUBJECT patch, but I question it's
usefulness in terms of PM.  What's more valuable for PM is the statitics
and knobs exported on a per-device level by the runtime PM core (and
AFAICT, already included into tools like powertop.)

Kevin