Re: pwm: atmel: PWM may not properly disable

[Guillermo Rodriguez Garcia]

2016-05-11 16:31 GMT+02:00 Guillermo Rodriguez Garcia
<guille.rodriguez@xxxxxxxxx>:
> Hello,
>
> 2016-05-11 15:39 GMT+02:00 Thierry Reding <thierry.reding@xxxxxxxxx>:
>> On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 10:48:38AM +0200, Guillermo Rodriguez Garcia wrote:
>>> Hello all,
>>>
>>> I am seeing a problem with the atmel-pwm driver where disabling a PWM
>>> channel sometimes leaves the output at the wrong level ("wrong" == not
>>> idle, as per the configured polarity). This causes problems when the
>>> PWM is used to drive a LED or certain types of buzzers.
>>>
>>> The issue seems to be in the atmel_pwm_disable function [1], which
>>> disables the clock immediately after writing to the PWM_DIS register.
>>> As a result, the write does not seem to take effect.
>>>
>>> I have verified that this is the cause of the problem this by waiting
>>> until the channel is effectively disabled (by checking the PWM_SR
>>> register) before disabling the clock. This fixes the issue and the PWM
>>> output now stays at the idle level after the channel is disabled.
>>>
>>> For the above I used a modified version of a patch that was posted to
>>> the list some time ago [2]. Note that only atmel_pwm_disable needs to
>>> be patched, there seems to be no need to patch atmel_pwm_enable. The
>>> code is as follows:
>>>
>>>      atmel_pwm_writel(atmel_pwm, PWM_DIS, 1 << pwm->hwpwm);
>>> +    while (atmel_pwm_readl(atmel_pwm, PWM_SR) & (1 << pwm->hwpwm)) {
>>> +        cpu_relax();
>>> +    }
>>>
>>>      clk_disable(atmel_pwm->clk);
>>>
>>> Is this acceptable? Should I submit an updated patch?
>>>
>>>  [1]: http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/drivers/pwm/pwm-atmel.c#L253
>>>  [2]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/10/1/605
>>>
>>> (If possible, please CC me in any replies)
>>
>> Okay, so the above makes a lot more sense than Robert's original patch.
>> The biggest issue that stuck out at the time was that the code kept
>> writing to the PWM_DIS register. Your example shows that PWM_SR is the
>> status register and your loop shows that it's enough to simply wait for
>> the PWM to become enabled (Robert's patch suggested that writes to
>> PWM_DIS might not make it through, and hence they had to be repeated).
>>
>> As for atmel_pwm_enable() I'm tempted to request a similar change. The
>> reason is that the PWM API expects (though it isn't technically enforced
>> in any way) that the PWM output is enabled after the function exits. It
>> seems reasonable to me that disabling would take a while (the remainder
>> of the current period for example) whereas enabling might always be
>> immediate. As such it wouldn't be technically necessary to have the loop
>> so I'm not going to insist if everything indicates the above is indeed
>> how the hardware works.
>>
>> One thing that I'd request is that instead of the cpu_relax() you use a
>> usleep_range() within the loop instead. I assume it can potentially take
>> a long time for the current period to finish, so busy looping isn't such
>> a great idea. You could possibly use the current period_ns to derive a
>> meaningful value to pass to usleep_range().
>
> I am not sure yet but I believe disabling does not really need to wait for the
> current period to finish (at least the datasheets do not mention this anywhere).
> I think that the after writing to PWM_DIS, the actual disable operation is
> initiated immediately in the PWM subsystem, but is executed asynchronously
> and requires the pwm_clk to complete. If this assumption is correct, perhaps
> it is enough to do one single read from PWM_SR so that the disable operation
> has had the chance to propagate. This is again assuming that all operations
> are executed sequentially within the PWM subsystem.
>
> If the above is correct, then we would not need a loop at all.

I was wrong. The required delay indeed seems to depend on the current PWM
frequency, suggesting that indeed disabling does not take effect until
the current
period is finished.

I will prepare a patch using usleep_range instead of cpu_relax.

Guillermo Rodriguez Garcia
guille.rodriguez@xxxxxxxxx