Re: [alsa-devel] [PATCH v2 3/3] ASoC: TDA7802: Add turn-on diagnostic routine

From: Thomas Preston
Date: Fri Aug 02 2019 - 04:32:27 EST


On 02/08/2019 00:42, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 30, 2019 at 05:28:11PM +0100, Thomas Preston wrote:
>> On 30/07/2019 16:50, Mark Brown wrote:
>
>>> Like I say it's not just debugfs though, there's the standard driver
>>> interface too.
>
>> Ah right, I understand. So if we run the turn-on diagnostics routine, there's
>> nothing stopping anyone from interacting with the device in other ways.
>
>> I guess there's no way to share that mutex with ALSA? In that case, it doesn't
>> matter if this mutex is there or not - this feature is incompatible. How
>> compatible do debugfs interfaces have to be? I was under the impression anything
>> goes. I would argue that the debugfs is better off for having the mutex so
>> that no one re-reads "diagnostic" within the 5s poll timeout.
>
> It's not really something that's supported; like Charles says the DAPM
> mutex is exposed but if the regular controls would still be able to do
> stuff. It is kind of a "you broke it, you fix it" thing but on the
> other hand it's better to make things safer if we can since it might not
> be obvious later on why things are broken.
>
>> Alternatively, this diagnostic feature could be handled with an external-handler
>> kcontrol SOC_SINGLE_EXT? I'm not sure if this is an atomic interface either.
>>
>> What would be acceptable?
>
> Yes, that's definitely doable - we've got some other drivers with
> similar things like calibration triggers exposed that way.
>

One problem with using a kcontrol as a trigger for the turn-on diagnostic
is that the diagnostic routine has a "return value".

It goes like this:
- Bring device to low-quiescent state
- Initiate diagnostics
- Poll for diagnostics-complete bit
- Read the four channel status registers

The final read clears the status registers, so this isn't something I
can just do with regmap.

One idea I had was to initiate the turn-on diagnostics using a kcontrol,
whose handler saves the four channel status registers and an epoch in
tda7802_priv. Then this can be read from debugfs. But it seems strange
to have to turn on this control over here, then go over there and read
this value.

Hm, maybe a better idea is to have the turn on diagnostic only run on
device probe (as its name suggests!), and print something to dmesg:

modprobe tda7802 turn_on_diagnostic=1

tda7802-codec i2c-TDA7802:00: Turn on diagnostic 04 04 04 04

Kirill Marinushkin mentioned this in the first review [0], it just didn't
really sink in until now!

[0] https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/6/14/1344