Re: Context expectations in ALSA

From: Maxime Ripard
Date: Thu Oct 22 2020 - 09:24:18 EST


Hi Takashi,

On Thu, Oct 22, 2020 at 03:20:49PM +0200, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Oct 2020 14:57:41 +0200,
> Maxime Ripard wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Oct 22, 2020 at 12:03:19PM +0200, Jaroslav Kysela wrote:
> > > Dne 22. 10. 20 v 11:50 Maxime Ripard napsal(a):
> > >
> > > > So, I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do here. The drivers
> > > > involved don't appear to be doing anything extraordinary, but the issues
> > > > lockdep report are definitely valid too. What are the expectations in
> > > > terms of context from ALSA when running the callbacks, and how can we
> > > > fix it?
> > >
> > > I think that you should set the non-atomic flag and wake up the workqueue or
> > > so from interrupt handler in this case. Call snd_pcm_period_elapsed() from the
> > > workqueue not the interrupt handler context.
> >
> > Yeah, that was my first guess too. However, the DMA driver uses some
> > kind of generic helpers using a tasklet, so getting rid of it would take
> > some work and would very likely not be eligible for stable.
>
> Who sets the nonatomic flag for vc4? I couldn't find the relevant
> code in the latest upstream.

Sorry if this wasn't clear enough, it's not there at the moment, ALSA
takes a spinlock and lockdep complains that we're sleeping in an atomic
context.

I tried to add the nonatomic flag in my tree to see if it was fixing the
issue, but ran into another lockdep complain now with ALSA taking a
mutex in a tasklet.

> Ideally dmaengine PCM helper should support the nonatomic mode, but
> until then, the other side needs to drop the nonatomic flag, I
> suppose.

In this case, I'm not sure the blame is in the PCM helper but if there's
any blame, I guess it's the virt-chan layer inside dmaengine (so for
providers) that use a tasklet instead of something that allows sleeping

Maxime

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