Re: [PATCH 2/2] serial: sc16is7xx: set TX FIFO trigger level to half FIFO to prevent underruns

[David Laight]

On Tue, 23 Jun 2026 19:13:28 +0200
Paul Mbewe <paultyson.mbewe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi David,
> 
> On the test system, the relevant threads already run with RT priority:
> 
>   irq/134-spi2.0     SCHED_FIFO priority 50
>   sc16is7xx          SCHED_FIFO priority 50
> 
> So this is not caused by the IRQ thread running as a normal SCHED_OTHER
> task. That does not remove all latency sources, of course; on this
> single-core SPI system the threaded IRQ can still be affected by other
> RT/kernel activity, IRQ/preemption-disabled sections, SPI transfer time,
> or lock contention.
> 
> I agree, changing the TX trigger from 8 to 32 free spaces reduces the
> per-interrupt time-to-empty margin. With an 8-space trigger the FIFO
> still contains 56 bytes when THRI asserts, while with a 32-space trigger
> it contains 32 bytes. So the v1 commit message is misleading when it
> describes this as increasing the refill window.
> 
> The observed effect is instead that the 8-space trigger causes many
> small TX refill events. Each event has roughly the same cost, as you
> said. If the handler runs in time, it can catch up by seeing more than
> 8 free spaces and writing more data. The failure happens when one event
> is delayed long enough for the FIFO to drain.
> 
> Using a 32-space trigger reduces the number of refill events and the
> associated IRQ/SPI load. It also reduces the chance that one delayed
> event lets the FIFO drain completely. On the tested setup this reduced
> irq/134-spi2.0 CPU usage from about 15-17% to about 5%, sys CPU from
> about 51-61% to about 19-28%, and load average from about 2.0-2.2 to
> about 0.65-1.3. With that change, the observed TX gaps disappeared.

Even with those figures (and the cpu % differences seem reasonable)
I still don't see why it stops the underruns.

An interesting exercise would be to call to ftrace_stop() when the
tx fifo is unexpectedly nearly empty.
Then enable all the ftrace scheduler and interrupt events (they don't
normally slow things down that much) and run the test with ftrace enabled.
When the trace gets stopped (you can just 'cat tracing_on' to find out
when it has been stopped) just 'less trace' to see what happened.
I think that will show that the isr thread is scheduled but doesn't
run for a while because something else is 'hogging' the cpu.

I've used this set of events - seemed to be useful.
    Clear old events
echo >set_event

    System call entry and exit:
echo 'syscalls:*' >>set_event

    IRQ entry and exit:
echo irq:irq_handler_entry irq:irq_handler_exit >>set_event
echo irq:softirq_entry irq:softirq_exit >>set_event

    Scheduler process switch events:
echo sched:sched_switch >>set_event
echo sched:sched_wakeup sched:sched_wakeup_new >>set_event
echo sched:sched_migrate_task >>set_event

	David
  
> 
> So I agree the commit message should be reworked to describe this as
> reducing TX refill events and IRQ/SPI load, not as increasing the
> per-interrupt latency margin.
> 
> If changing the default trigger globally is considered too broad, I can
> also look at making the TX trigger configurable or limiting the change to
> SPI-backed devices.
> 
> Thanks
> Paul
> 
> _______________________________________ 
> 
> ZIEHL-ABEGG 
> 
> Executive Board: Joachim Ley (Chairman), Marco Altherr, Wolfgang Mayer
> Supervisory Board: Dennis Ziehl (Chairman) 
> 
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