Re: [RFC PATCH 00/21] IIO: Channel registration rework, buffer chardevcombining and rewrite of triggers as 'virtual' irq_chips.

[Jonathan Cameron]

On 04/04/11 13:02, Michael Hennerich wrote:
> On 03/31/2011 04:53 PM, Jonathan Cameron wrote:
>> Dear All,
>>
>> I'm afraid what in many ways makes sense as three separate
>> series have gotten rather intertwined.  I can probably unpick
>> them but it will involve a lot of intermediate code in
>> lis3l02dq (which is our fiddly example for this set) that I'd
>> rather avoid.  Hence lets have a guide to what various people
>> might be interested in:
>>
>> 1) Channel registration rework (this has previous been in linux-iio
>>    but really comes into it's own after we remove various special
>>    cases later in this code).
>>
>>    Patches 1, 2, 3, 21
>>    (8) - cleanups Arnd Bergmann pointed out in passing.
>>   
> Good approach. It removes quite a bit on duplicated code across drivers.
> At the moment I can't think of existing drivers that couldn't moved over
> to the
> new channel registration method.
There are a few that will require quite a bit more code - principally the
light sensors with their rather odd channel naming.  I'll do one of those
shortly and see what we end up with.

> However there are some limitations.
> read_raw() value is currently type int, depending on the channel type,
> int type might be too short.
True. How far do you think we should go?  s64? I did wonder if it makes sense
to have two value pointers (perhaps NULL)  So base unit (val1) and
decimal places of base unit (val2).

So true raw values (e.g. sensor readings) will only set val1, but we have plenty
of space for things like scale at sufficient accuracy.  That also means we can
flatten together the attributes in the core for both cases (not a great saving
but nice to have none the less).

What do you think?

> 
>  
>> 2) Flattening together of (some) of the chardevs (buffer related ones).
>>    As Arnd pointed out, there is really a use case for having multiple
>>    watershed type events from ring buffers.  Much better to have a
>>    single one (be that at a controllable point).  Firstly this removes
>>    the need for the event escalation code.  Second, this single 'event'
>>    can then be indicated to user space purely using polling on the
>>    access chrdev.  This approach does need an additional attribute to
>>    tell user space what the poll succeeding indicates (tbd).
>>
>>    I haven't for now merged the ring handling with the more general
>>    event handling as Arnd suggested.  This is for two reasons
>>    1) It's much easier to debug this done in a couple of steps
>>    2) The approach Arnd suggested may work well, but it is rather
>>    different to how other bits of the kernel pass event type data
>>    to user space.  It's an interesting idea, but I'd rather any
>>    discussion of that approach was separate from the obviously
>>    big gains seen here.
>>
>>    Patches 4, 5, 6, 7, 17
>>   
> I appreciate the removal of the buffer event chardev. Adding support for
> poll is also a good thing to do.
> However support for a blocking read might also fit some use cases.
Good point. I guess blocking on any content and poll for the watershead
gives the best of both worlds.  The blocking read is more down to the
individual implementations than a core feature though - so one to do
after this patch set.
>  
>> 3) Reworking the triggering infrastructure to use 'virtual' irq_chips
>>    This approach was suggested by Thomas Gleixner.
>>    Before we had explicit trigger consumer lists.  This made for a very
>>    clunky implementation when we considered moving things over to
>>    threaded interrupts.  Thomas pointed out we were reinventing the
>>    wheel and suggested more or less what we have here (I hope ;)
>>   
> Using threaded interrupts, greatly reduces use of additional workqueues
> and excessive interrupt enable and disables.
There is a nasty side issue here.  What do we do if we are getting triggers
faster than all of the consumers can work at?  Right now things tend to
stall.  I think we just want to gracefully stop the relevant trigger
if this happens.  I'm not quite sure how we can notify userspace that this
has happened... Perhaps POLLERR? 
>   
>>    Patches 9 and 10 are minor rearrangements of code in the one
>>    driver I know of where the physical interrupt line for events
>>    is the same as that for data ready signals (though not at the
>>    same time).
>>   
> I wouldn't consider this being a corner case. I know quite a few devices
> that trigger data availability,
> and other events from the same physical interrupt line, and they may do
> it at the same time.
If they do it at the same time things may get a bit nasty. Things are somewhat
simpler after some of the later patches, as the irq requests are entirely
handled in the drivers.  Thus the driver could have one interrupt handler.
The restriction will be that it would only be able to do nested irq calls
limiting us to not having a top half for anything triggered from such an
interrupt. This is because identifying whether we have a dataready or
other event will require querying the device and hence sleeping. Note
the sysfs trigger driver will also have this restriction (as posted yesterday).

For devices where they share the line but cannot happen at the same time I'd
prefer to do what we have in the lis3l02dq and completely separate the two
uses of the interrupt line.

>  
>>    In a rare situation we have complete control of these virtual
>>    interrupts within the subsystem.  As such we want to be able to
>>    continue to build the subsystem as a module.  This requires a
>>    couple of additional exports in the generic irq core code and
>>    also arm (for my test board anyway).
>>    Patches 13 and 14 make these changes.  I hope they won't prove
>>    to controversial.
>>
>>    Patch 15 adds a board info built in element to the IIO subsystem
>>    so we have a means of platform data telling us what interrupt
>>    numbers are available for us to play with.  Does anyone have
>>    a better way of doing this?  Patch 16 is an example of what
>>    needs to go in board files.
>>   
> Since this is purely platform dependent, setting the irq pool from the
> board setup looks acceptable to me, and depending on the arch or machine
> it might be necessary two tweak some other defines.
> However many arches define NR_IRQS always greater than actually used. So
> why not make IR-Base a Kconfig option?
There is currently a nasty hack in the irq codes to deal with the fact that
for at least some (maybe all) arm chips NR_IRQS is set to those on the SOC
and doesn't include any others.  The work around for that is that all the
irq handling adds a chunk of padding.  I would hope that will go away at
some point in the future.
Otherwise, yes we could indeed make it a KCONFIG option subject to some
fiddling with individual arches to make it work.  This may be one to tackle
when moving out of staging rather than now though.

Perhaps we need to try it on a few architectures and see what is needed on each?

Thanks for taking a look!

Jonathan 


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