Date:   Tue, 26 Sep 2023 15:54:57 +0300
From:   Ivaylo Dimitrov <ivo.g.dimitrov.75@...il.com>
To:     Tony Lindgren <tony@...mide.com>, Sean Young <sean@...s.org>
Cc:     linux-media@...r.kernel.org, Russell King <linux@...linux.org.uk>,
        Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@...nel.org>,
        Thierry Reding <thierry.reding@...il.com>,
        Uwe Kleine-König <u.kleine-koenig@...gutronix.de>,
        Timo Kokkonen <timo.t.kokkonen@....fi>,
        Pali Rohár <pali.rohar@...il.com>,
        "Sicelo A . Mhlongo" <absicsz@...il.com>,
        linux-omap@...r.kernel.org, linux-arm-kernel@...ts.infradead.org,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-pwm@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v5 2/2] media: rc: remove ir-rx51 in favour of generic
 pwm-ir-tx



On 26.09.23 г. 10:37 ч., Tony Lindgren wrote:
> * Sean Young <sean@...s.org> [230926 07:16]:
>> On Mon, Sep 25, 2023 at 07:06:44PM +0300, Ivaylo Dimitrov wrote:
>>> On 1.09.23 г. 17:18 ч., Sean Young wrote:
>>>> The ir-rx51 is a pwm-based TX driver specific to the N900. This can be
>>>> handled entirely by the generic pwm-ir-tx driver, and in fact the
>>>> pwm-ir-tx driver has been compatible with ir-rx51 from the start.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Unfortunately, pwm-ir-tx does not work on n900. My investigation shows that
>>> for some reason usleep_range() sleeps for at least 300-400 us more than what
>>> interval it is requested to sleep. I played with cyclictest from rt-tests
>>> package and it gives similar results - increasing the priority helps, but I
>>> was not able to make it sleep for less that 300 us in average. I tried
>>> cpu_latency_qos_add_request() in pwm-ir-tx, but it made no difference.
>>>
>>> I get similar results on motorola droid4 (OMAP4), albeit there average sleep
>>> is in 200-300 us range, which makes me believe that either OMAPs have issues
>>> with hrtimers or the config we use has some issue which leads to scheduler
>>> latency. Or, something else...
>>
>> The pwm-ir-tx driver does suffer from this problem, but I was under the
>> impression that the ir-rx51 has the same problem.
>>
>>> In either case help is appreciated to dig further trying to find the reason
>>> for such a big delay.
>>
>> pwm-ir-tx uses usleep_range() and ir-rx51 uses hrtimers. I thought that
>> usleep_range() uses hrtimers; however if you're not seeing the same delay
>> on ir-rx51 then maybe it's time to switch pwm-ir-tx to hrtimers.
> 
> Maybe using fsleep() fixes this issue? See commit c6af13d33475 ("timer: add
> fsleep for flexible sleeping"), and Documentation/timers/timers-howto.rst.
> 

I doubt, time intervals we are talking about are > 500 us, which means 
fsleep will always use usleep_range() (or even worse, msleep()), see 
https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v6.6-rc3/source/include/linux/delay.h#L82

> The long wake-up time for an idle state could explain the values. I think
> Ivaylo already tested with most cpuidle states disabled via sysfs though.
> 

Yes, I disabled all idle states on both n900 and droid4 (when doing 
cyclictest experiments), with no difference. I also locked frequency on 
n900 to 500MHz, which improved the things a bit, by some 20-50 us 
(IIRC), which makes sense, but also makes me think frequency scaling is 
not the one to blame either.

>> I don't have a n900 to test on, unfortunately.
> 
> If you want one for development, the maemo folks cc:ed here likely have
> some available devices.
> 

I think we can arrange one, yes, but my gut feeling tells me the issue 
is not n900 specific, it is just a bit worse there as the device is 
relatively slow already. I have no sane explanation why one would see 
similar latencies on droid4, given that it is times faster than n900.

Regards,

Ivo

> Regards,
> 
> Tony
> 

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