Re: [PATCH 07/16] spi: bcm63xx-hsspi: Add polling mode support

From: William Zhang
Date: Wed Jan 11 2023 - 15:14:08 EST




On 01/10/2023 02:49 PM, Mark Brown wrote:
On Mon, Jan 09, 2023 at 12:10:30PM -0800, William Zhang wrote:
On 01/09/2023 11:06 AM, Mark Brown wrote:

You can put whatever logic is needed in the code - for something like
this an architecture based define isn't ideal but is probably good
enough if need be (though I'd not be surprised if it turned out that
there was also some performance benefit for the MIPS systems too, at
least for smaller transfers).

I just don't know what other logic I can put in the driver to select
interrupt or polling mode. Only the end user know if performance or cpu
usage is more important to their application.

Usually you can take a reasonable guess as to what would be a good point
to start switching, typically for short enough transfers the overhead of
setting up DMA, waiting for interrupts and tearing things down is very
much larger than the cost of just doing PIO - a bunch of other drivers
have pick a number logic of some kind, often things like FIFO sizes are
a good key for where to look. A lot of the time this is good enough,
and it means that users have much better facilities for making tradeoffs
if they have a range of transfer sizes available - it's not an either/or
thing but based on some features of the individual message/transfer.

It is true that for people with heavy SPI traffic or otherwise very
demanding requirements for a specific system and software stack
additional tuning might produce better results, exposing some sysfs
knobs to allow tuning of parameters at runtime would be helpful for them
and I'd certainly be happy to see that added.

Thanks for the explanation. I saw the spi-uniphier.c and spi-bcm2835.c doing the trick you mentioned(thanks Kursad for pointing out). In our case, even the maximum fifo size usage(512bytes), the polling still have better performance than interrupt. The MTD test result included in this patch is based on maximum fifo usage. So there is no benefit to switch to interrupt based on transfer size.

Does the spi framework has any requirement on how much time that the driver's transfer_one function can spend? I can see the polling function might take quite some time in busy loop if the clock is low, for example, at 100Hz(slowest clock this controller can go), it takes 512x8/100Hz ~= 41ms to complete. If this is something in concern, I can do the interrupt switch based on a time limit value if interrupt is available.

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