Re: [PATCH] i2c/busses: (mpc) Add support for SMBUS_READ_BLOCK_DATA

[York Sun]

On Wed, 2011-11-16 at 19:09 +0100, Jean Delvare wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Nov 2011 09:55:35 -0800, York Sun wrote:
> > On Wed, 2011-11-16 at 09:36 -0800, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> > > York,
> > > 
> > > The calling code expects the data length in data[0], and the actual data
> > > in data[1] .. data[<byte_count>]. The initial value for length is 1; the
> > > byte count is added to it, so <byte count + 1> bytes are placed into the
> > > buffer.
> > > 
> > > Thanks,
> > > Guenter
> > 
> > Thanks for explanation. I am more confused by the length += byte now.
> > For I2C bus, if you need length of byte, just keep reading until you get
> > all of them. Of course you need to deal with the ACK. For SMBus, it is
> > similar but you shouldn't read more after the byte count which is in the
> > first data.
> 
> You shouldn't read less either. The slave tells how much bytes it wants
> to send, and the master must honor that.
> 
> > If you want to read length of data but the block size is
> > bigger than length, you should call block read at first place. If the
> > block size is smaller than length, why increase the length? Does your
> > SMBus controller only support fixed block size and not support single
> > byte read? If it does, I would do
> > 
> > Block, Block, Block, byte, byte... until length of data
> 
> Your thinking is too focused on I2C block reads (or even block read of
> data over the network or on disk). SMBus block read is something
> completely different. It's not about reading 200 bytes of data and
> receiving it in 16-byte chunks (I2C block read works that way, on
> EEPROMs in particular.) There is no "data length" and "block size" to
> compare to each other. It's about reading the value of _one_ register
> and this value happens to be multi-byte. There is typically _no_
> register pointer increment (automatic or not) involved as can happen
> with EEPROMs. If an SMBus block read from register N returns 10 bytes,
> you're not going to read the next 10 bytes from register N+10. There
> are no "next 10 bytes" to read, and register N+10 is something
> completely unrelated.
> 
> And for this reason, it is not possible to mix SMBus block reads with
> byte reads, as can be done with I2C block reads.
> 
> Also note that there is a limit of 32 bytes for SMBus block transfers,
> per SMBus specification. All slaves and masters must comply with it.
> 
> I hope I managed to clarify the case this time...
> 

You have made it much clear. If block size is fixed and block read
cannot mix with byte read, shall we do this

if length < block_size
   read block_size
else {
   while (length) {
       read block_size
       length -= block_size
   }

York




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