On Thu, Dec 8, 2016 at 11:54 AM, Mason <slash.tmp@xxxxxxx> wrote: > On 08/12/2016 11:39, Vinod Koul wrote: >> On Wed, Dec 07, 2016 at 04:45:58PM +0000, Måns Rullgård wrote: >>> Vinod Koul <vinod.koul@xxxxxxxxx> writes: >>>> On Tue, Dec 06, 2016 at 01:14:20PM +0000, Måns Rullgård wrote: >>>>> That's not going to work very well. Device drivers typically request >>>>> dma channels in their probe functions or when the device is opened. >>>>> This means that reserving one of the few channels there will inevitably >>>>> make some other device fail to operate. >>>> >>>> No that doesn't make sense at all, you should get a channel only when you >>>> want to use it and not in probe! >>> >>> Tell that to just about every single driver ever written. >> >> Not really, few do yes which is wrong but not _all_ do that. > > Vinod, > > Could you explain something to me in layman's terms? > > I have a NAND Flash Controller driver that depends on the > DMA driver under discussion. > > Suppose I move the dma_request_chan() call from the driver's > probe function, to the actual DMA transfer function. > > I would want dma_request_chan() to put the calling thread > to sleep until a channel becomes available (possibly with > a timeout value). > > But Maxime told me dma_request_chan() will just return > -EBUSY if no channels are available. > > Am I supposed to busy wait in my driver's DMA function > until a channel becomes available? Can you fall back to PIO if requesting a channel fails? Alternatively, dma_request_chan() could always succeed, and dmaengine_prep_slave_sg() could fail if the channel is currently not available due to a limitation on the number of active channels, and the driver could fall back to PIO for that transfer. Gr{oetje,eeting}s, Geert -- Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. -- Linus Torvalds -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe dmaengine" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html