Re: [PATCH v2] dmaengine: bcm2835: Add slave dma support

From: Jonathan Bell
Date: Fri May 08 2015 - 07:26:53 EST


On 06/05/2015 20:21, Noralf TrÃnnes wrote:

Den 01.05.2015 23:07, skrev Martin Sperl:
Tests with the initial (and incomplete) version of the spi-bcm2835 driver
with DMA transfer support show that the dma-engine works as expected with
this patch.

There is one one observation:

On 18.04.2015, at 13:06, Noralf TrÃnnes <noralf@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
+static struct dma_async_tx_descriptor *
+bcm2835_dma_prep_slave_sg(struct dma_chan *chan,
+ struct scatterlist *sgl,
+ unsigned int sg_len,
+ enum dma_transfer_direction direction,
+ unsigned long flags, void *context)
+{
...
+ /* Enable */
+ if (i == sg_len - 1 && len - j <= max_size)
+ control_block->info |= BCM2835_DMA_INT_EN;
The observation is that an interrupt is always triggered - even in the case
where flags does NOT have DMA_PREP_INTERRUPT set.
This may not be necessary and avoid interrupts.

So maybe the above if clause should get extended by:
&& (flags & DMA_PREP_INTERRUPT)
to only trigger an interrupt when really requested.

I am not sure if there are any side-effects because of this besides having the
requirement on the client to run dmaengine_terminate_all() on that specific dma
channel without interrupts when the transfer is finished.

In the case of SPI we have TX feed the fifo - which finishes early - , but we
only need to the interrupt when RX finishes reading the fifo, which indicates
that the SPI-transfer is fully finished.
So having an interrupt on TX is not necessary for the process.

The same observations may also apply to bcm2835_dma_prep_dma_cyclic (which is
outside of this patch provided by Noralf).

Jonathan, can you comment on this?


Noralf.


I agree that the interrupt generated would be spurious - in the case where it is not required.

However if you do && (flags & DMA_PREP_INTERRUPT) then all users of this driver need to explicitly set interrupt flags when doing a scatter-gather transfer. As I understand it, currently the only upstream client of this driver is the I2S driver which only uses cyclic anyway.

Not requiring an interrupt on completion is a bit of an edge case - the default among other dmaengine drivers appears to be to enable interrupts unconditionally.



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