Re: [PATCH AUTOSEL for-4.9 04/53] spi: imx: adjust watermark level according to transfer length

From: Mark Brown
Date: Wed Nov 08 2017 - 17:11:14 EST


On Wed, Nov 08, 2017 at 09:39:11PM +0000, Levin, Alexander (Sasha Levin) wrote:
> >On Wed, Nov 08, 2017 at 08:49:55PM +0000, Levin, Alexander (Sasha Levin) wrote:
> >This seems like an optimization not a bug fix...

> Hm, is it? I read it as "DMA is not being used at all even though we
> thought we're using it".

Yes, that's how I read it too.

> Yes, the impact is "just" performance, but doesn't it result in quite
> a significat impact?

Only about double according to the initial commit adding DMA support
which is frankly a bit disappointing although yeah, it's a big win. My
worry is that if there's a problem with DMA on some device for which a
fix wasn't backported (or where we're using a fallback) this could
expose problems if we start using it. If you look at the history of the
driver there's some quirks were added later on for example, and I didn't
check the DMA controller drivers or anything and obviously can't see any
out of tree code users may have.

*Probably* it doesn't break anything but since it's not fixing anything
and the risk is data corruption I'd be much more comfortable with a more
thorough risk analysis.

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: PGP signature