Re: Tearing down DMA transfer setup after DMA client has finished

[Måns Rullgård]

Vinod Koul <vinod.koul@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On Tue, Dec 06, 2016 at 01:42:31PM +0100, Mason wrote:
>> On 06/12/2016 06:12, Vinod Koul wrote:
>> 
>> > On Tue, Nov 29, 2016 at 07:25:02PM +0100, Mason wrote:
>> > 
>> >> Is there a way to write a driver within the existing framework?
>> > 
>> > I think so, looking back at comments from Russell, I do tend to agree with
>> > that. Is there a specific reason why sbox can't be tied to alloc and free
>> > channels?
>> 
>> Here's a recap of the situation.
>> 
>> The "SBOX+MBUS" HW is used in several iterations of the tango SoC:
>
> btw is SBOX setup dependent upon the peripheral connected to?

The sbox is basically a crossbar that connects each of a number of input
ports to any of a number of output ports.  A few of the inputs and
outputs are dma channels reading or writing to memory while the rest are
peripheral devices.  To perform a mem-to-device transfer, you pick a dma
read channel, program the sbox to connect it to the chosen device, and
finally program the dma channel with address and size to transfer.

>> tango3
>>   2 memory channels available
>>   6 devices ("clients"?) may request an MBUS channel
>
> But only 2 can get a channel at any time..
>
>> tango4 (one more channel)
>>   3 memory channels available
>>   7 devices may request an MBUS channel :
>>     NFC0, NFC1, SATA0, SATA1, memcpy, (IDE0, IDE1)
>
> Same here
>
> Only thing is users shouldn't hold on to channel and freeup when not in use.
>
>> Notes:
>> The current NFC driver supports only one controller.
>> IDE is mostly obsolete at this point.
>> 
>> tango5 (SATA gets own dedicated MBUS channel pair)
>>   3 memory channels available
>>   5 devices may request an MBUS channel :
>>     NFC0, NFC1, memcpy, (IDE0, IDE1)
>> 
>> 
>> If I understand the current DMA driver (written by Mans), client
>> drivers are instructed to use a specific channel in the DT, and
>> the DMA driver muxes access to that channel. The DMA driver
>> manages a per-channel queue of outstanding DMA transfer requests,
>> and a new transfer is started friom within the DMA ISR
>> (modulo the fact that the interrupt does not signal completion
>> of the transfer, as explained else-thread).
>> 
>> What you're proposing, Vinod, is to make a channel exclusive
>> to a driver, as long as the driver has not explicitly released
>> the channel, via dma_release_channel(), right?
>
> Precisely, but yes the downside of that is concurrent access are
> limited, but am not sure if driver implements virtual channels and
> allows that..

My driver implements virtual channels.  The problem is that the physical
dma channels signal completion slightly too soon, at least with
mem-to-device transfers.  Apparently we need to keep the sbox routing
until the peripheral indicates that it has actually received all the
data.

-- 
Måns Rullgård