Best practise for a polling device driver ?

From: Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult
Date: Thu Jun 29 2017 - 08:04:39 EST


Hi folks,

I'm currently writing a driver for an (pseudo-)serial device
(actually, a bunch of HW fifo's, which look like serial controllers
to the host), which only supports polling, no interrupts.

So far, I'm just using a kthread in a loop, but that would have to
run w/ high priority sleep very short (needs to transfer several
MB/s on a am33xx), so probably not a good idea.

Another option could be using timers for just looking at the status
registers and issue sw interrupts, which are then handled just like
the w/ the usual interrupt-driven serial ports (IOW: mimic an
interrupt controller).

What do you folks thinkt about that ?


thx.
--mtx