Re: [PATCH RFC v2 1/8] spi: dt-bindings: spi-peripheral-props: add spi-offloads property

[Conor Dooley]

On Wed, May 29, 2024 at 10:07:37AM +0200, Nuno Sá wrote:
> On Sun, 2024-05-26 at 18:35 +0100, Conor Dooley wrote:
> > On Thu, May 23, 2024 at 02:15:35PM +0200, Nuno Sá wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2024-05-22 at 19:24 +0100, Conor Dooley wrote:

> > > Taking the
> > > trigger (PWM) as an example and even when it is directly connected with the
> > > offload
> > > block, the peripheral still needs to know about it. Think of sampling
> > > frequency...
> > > The period of the trigger signal is strictly connected with the sampling
> > > frequency of
> > > the peripheral for example. So I see 2 things:
> > > 
> > > 1) Enabling/Disabling the trigger could be easily done from the peripheral even
> > > with
> > > the resource in the spi engine. I think David already has some code in the series
> > > that would make this trivial and so having the property in the spi controller
> > > brings
> > > no added complexity.
> > > 
> > > 2) Controlling things like the trigger period/sample_rate. This could be harder
> > > to do
> > > over SPI (or making it generic enough) so we would still need to have the same
> > > property on the peripheral (even if not directly connected to it). I kind of
> > > agree
> > > with David that having the property both in the peripheral and controller is a
> > > bit
> > > weird.
> > 
> > Can you explain what you mean by "same property on the peripheral"? I
> > would expect a peripheral to state its trigger period (just like how it
> > states the max frequency) and for the trigger period not to appear in
> > the controller.
> > 
> 
> Just have the same 'pwms' property on both the controller and peripheral...

Yeah, no... Opinion unchanged since my last message.

> > I think a way that this could be modelled to reduce some software
> > complexity is considering that the periodic trigger is a clock, not
> > a PWM, provided you are only interested in the period. That'd give you
> > an interface that was less concerned about what the provider of the
> > periodic trigger is. After all, I doubt the ADC cares how you decide to
> > generate the trigger, as long as the periodicity is correct.
> > With the examples provided, you'd get something like:
> > 
> 
> Unfortunately that's not the case.

Ahh, that sucks. Oh well.

> For instance, in the design on the link I gave you
> on the last reply we do have an averaging mode where we actually need an offset
> (effort for supporting that in PWM is already ongoing) between the offload trigger
> and the peripheral conversion signal (so assuming we only care about period will fail
> pretty soon :)).

> > > And the DMA block is a complete different story. Sharing that data back with the
> > > peripheral driver (in this case, the IIO subsystem) would be very interesting at
> > > the
> > > very least. Note that the DMA block is not really something that is part of the
> > > controller nor the offload block. It is an external block that gets the data
> > > coming
> > > out of the offload engine (or the data reorder block). In IIO, we already have a
> > > DMA
> > > buffer interface so users of the peripheral can get the data without any
> > > intervention
> > > of the driver (on the data). We "just" enable buffering and then everything
> > > happens
> > > on HW and userspace can start requesting data. If we are going to attach the DMA
> > > in
> > > the controller, I have no idea how we can handle it. Moreover, the offload it's
> > > really just a way of replaying the same spi transfer over and over and that
> > > happens
> > > in HW so I'm not sure how we could "integrate" that with dmaengine.
> > > 
> > > But maybe I'm overlooking things... And thinking more in how this can be done in
> > > SW
> > > rather than what makes sense from an HW perspective.
> > 
> > I don't think you're overlooking things at all, I'm intentionally being
> > a bit difficult and ignoring what may be convenient for the adc driver.
> > This is being presented as a solution to a generic problem (and I think
> > you're right to do that), but it feels as if the one implementation is
> > all that's being considered here and I'm trying to ensure that what we
> > end up with doesn't make limiting assumptions.
> 
> Yeah, I know and I do agree we need something generic enough and not something that
> only fits a couple usecases.

If only we had another user... I suppose you lads are the market leader
in these kinds of devices. If I did happen to know if Microchip was
working on anything similar (which I don't, I work on FPGAs not these
kinds of devices) I couldn't even tell you. I suppose I could ask around
and see. Do you know if TI is doing anything along these lines?

> > Part of me says "sure, hook the DMAs up to the devices, as that's what
> > happens for other IIO devices" but at the same time I recognise that the
> > DMA isn't actually hooked up like that and the other IIO devices I see
> > like that are all actually on the SoC, rather than connected over SPI.
> 
> Yeah, I know... But note (but again, only for ADI designs) that the DMA role is
> solely for carrying the peripheral data. It is done like this so everything works in
> HW and there's no need for SW to deal with the samples at all. I mean, only the
> userspace app touches the samples.
> 
> TBH, the DMA is the bit that worries me the most as it may be overly complex to share
> buffers (using dma-buf or something else) from the spi controller back to consumers
> of it (IIO in this case). And I mean sharing in a way that there's no need to touch
> the buffers.

<snip>

> Maybe having an offload dedicated API (through spi) to get/share a DMA handle would
> be acceptable. Then we could add support to "import" it in the IIO core. Then it
> would be up to the controller to accept or not to share the handle (in some cases the
> controller could really want to have the control of the DMA transfers).

Yeah, that is about what I was thinking. I wasn't expecting the spi code
to grow handing for dmabuf or anything like that, just a way for the
offload consumer to say "yo, can you tell me what dma buffer I can
use?". Unless (until?) there's some controller that wants to manage it,
I think that'd be sufficient?

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