linux-kernel - Re: Tearing down DMA transfer setup after DMA client has finished

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Message-ID: <7900ae24-6803-a271-944c-8830f718fef0@free.fr>
Date:   Fri, 9 Dec 2016 19:23:17 +0100
From:   Mason <slash.tmp@...e.fr>
To:     Vinod Koul <vinod.koul@...el.com>
Cc:     Sebastian Frias <sf84@...oste.net>,
        Russell King <linux@....linux.org.uk>,
        dmaengine@...r.kernel.org,
        Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@...aro.org>,
        Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@...el.com>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Linux ARM <linux-arm-kernel@...ts.infradead.org>,
        Jon Mason <jdmason@...zu.us>, Mark Brown <broonie@...nel.org>,
        Lars-Peter Clausen <lars@...afoo.de>,
        Lee Jones <lee.jones@...aro.org>,
        Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@...asonboard.com>,
        Arnd Bergmann <arnd@...db.de>,
        Maxime Ripard <maxime.ripard@...e-electrons.com>,
        Dave Jiang <dave.jiang@...el.com>,
        Peter Ujfalusi <peter.ujfalusi@...com>,
        Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz <b.zolnierkie@...sung.com>,
        Thibaud Cornic <thibaud_cornic@...madesigns.com>
Subject: Re: Tearing down DMA transfer setup after DMA client has finished

[ Dropping Mans to preserve his peace-of-mind ]

On 09/12/2016 18:56, Vinod Koul wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 09, 2016 at 06:34:15PM +0100, Mason wrote:
>> On 09/12/2016 18:17, Vinod Koul wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, Dec 09, 2016 at 11:25:57AM +0100, Sebastian Frias wrote:
>>>>
>>>> What concrete solution do you propose?
>>>
>>> I have already proposed two solutions.
>>>
>>> A) Request a channel only when you need it. Obviously we can't do virtual
>>> channels with this (though we should still use virt-channels framework).
>>> The sbox setup and teardown can be done as part of channel request and
>>> freeup. PL08x already does this.
>>>
>>> Downside is that we can only have as many consumers at a time as channels.
>>>
>>> I have not heard any technical reason for not doing this apart from drivers
>>> grab the channel at probe, which is incorrect and needs to be fixed
>>> irrespective of the problem at hand.
>>>
>>> This is my preferred option.
>>
>> There is one important drawback with this solution. If a driver calls
>> dma_request_chan() when no channels are currently available, it will
>> get -EBUSY. If there were a flag in dma_request_chan to be put to
>> sleep (with timeout) until a channel is available, then it would
>> work. But busy waiting in the client driver is a waste of power.
> 
> Right, but in that case the fallback would be PIO mode, and if that is
> not availble (IIRC some f your devices don't) then reject the usage with
> EAGAIN.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how that would help.
Take the NAND Flash controller driver, for instance. PIO is not
an option, because the ECC engine is tied to DMA.

And failing with -EAGAIN doesn't help the busy looping situation.
The caller should be put on some kind of queue to wait for a
"channel ready" event.

Regards.