Changes since v1: * Typo fixes and some comment rewording * Dropped the dummy DMA driver until the dummy IIO driver has moved out of staging Original cover letter below: This series contains phase 1 of adding DMA buffer support to the IIO framework. It adds the necessary in-kernel infrastructure to support DMA buffers, but does not yet modify the userspace ABI. The traditional approach used in IIO to implement buffered capture requires the generation of at least one interrupt per sample. In the interrupt handler the driver reads the sample from the device and copies it to a software buffer. This approach has a rather large per sample overhead associated with it. And while it works fine for samplerates in the range of up to 1000 samples per second it starts to consume a rather large share of the available CPU processing time once we go beyond that, this is especially true on an embedded system with limited processing power. The regular interrupt also causes increased power consumption by not allowing the hardware into deeper sleep states, which is something that becomes more and more important on mobile battery powered devices. And while the recently added watermark support mitigates some of the issues by allowing the device to generate interrupts at a rate lower than the data output rate, this still requires a storage buffer inside the device and even if it exists it is only a few 100 samples deep at most. DMA support on the other hand allows to capture multiple millions or even more samples without any CPU interaction. This allows the CPU to either go to sleep for longer periods or focus on other tasks which increases overall system performance and power consumption. In addition to that some devices might not even offer a way to read the data other than using DMA, which makes DMA mandatory to use for them. For the DMA buffer support that is introduced in this series sample data is grouped in so called blocks. A block is the basic unit at which data is exchanged between the application and the hardware. The application is responsible for allocating the memory associated with the block and then passes the block to the hardware. When the hardware has captured the amount of samples equal to size of a block it will notify the application, which can then read the data from the block and process it. The block size can be freely chosen (within the constraints of the hardware). This allows to make a trade-off between latency and management overhead. The larger the block size the lower the per sample overhead but the latency between when the data was captured and when the application will be able to access it increases, in a similar way smaller block sizes have a larger per sample management overhead but a lower latency. The ideal block size thus depends on system and application requirements. The series starts with some minor modifications to the watermark handling code, primarily for dealing with fixed watermarks. It then adds support for enable()/disable() callbacks to the iio_buffer_access_ops. This allows the DMA buffer support to start and stop the DMA controller when the buffer is enabled and disabled. The next patch after that contains the core of this series. It adds a generic infrastructure for managing DMA buffers and while this is not a complete buffer implementation on its own it contains support for all the management work that is necessary to support DMA buffers, i.e. implementing the IIO buffer callbacks. The only thing not part of this infrastructure is configuring and setting up the DMA controller hardware itself. This is left to be implemented by a device driver which wants to support DMA buffer support and can be hooked up into the generic infrastructure by two simple callbacks. This minimizes the per driver code that is necessary to implement a DMA buffer. On top of that the series adds support for DMA buffers to the IIO dummy simple driver. This code can be used as a template for implementing new DMA buffer drivers as well as for testing the generic DMA buffer infrastructure in absence of hardware with DMA capabilities. Finally this series introduces a fully functional and completely hardware independent DMA buffer implementation which binds the previously introduced generic IIO DMA buffer infrastructure to the DMAengine framework. Which is used setup the actual hardware transfers. This reduces the amount of driver specific code for implementing a DMA buffer to two lines. One for registering the buffer and one for unregistering it. This makes using the DMAengine based buffer implementation the recommended way of implementing a DMA buffer for a device. The DMA buffer support has been successfully used and tested at Analog Devices for a while now with a wide variety of high speed data acquisition and processing systems with sample rates going up to multiple giga samples per second. Andrey Yurovsky has also successfully added DMA buffer support to the existing AT91 ADC driver allowing faster and more efficient data capture. The next step after this series and phase 2 is to extend the DMA buffer support with some userspace ABI additions, this includes support for giving userspace a more fine grained control over buffer allocation and management as well as support for mmap() and splice(). mmap() allows to access the buffer data from userspace without having to copy it which additionally reduces the management overhead. While splice() allows to exchange data with other kernel buffers without having to copy it, this can for example be used to send the data to a network or storage disk controller. For more background information on using IIO for high-speed data acquisition and using the DMA buffer support please also refer to [1] and [2] as well as [3]. - Lars [1] http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/iio_high_speed.pdf [2] https://wiki.analog.com/resources/tools-software/linux-software/libiio_internals#high-speed_mmap_interface [3] https://wiki.analog.com/resources/tools-software/linux-software/libiio_internals#zerocopy Lars-Peter Clausen (6): iio: Set device watermark based on watermark of all attached buffers iio:iio_buffer_init(): Only set watermark if not already set iio: Add support for indicating fixed watermarks iio: Add buffer enable/disable callbacks iio: Add generic DMA buffer infrastructure iio: Add a DMAengine framework based buffer drivers/iio/buffer/Kconfig | 20 + drivers/iio/buffer/Makefile | 2 + drivers/iio/buffer/industrialio-buffer-dma.c | 683 +++++++++++++++++++++ drivers/iio/buffer/industrialio-buffer-dmaengine.c | 213 +++++++ drivers/iio/industrialio-buffer.c | 58 +- include/linux/iio/buffer-dma.h | 150 +++++ include/linux/iio/buffer-dmaengine.h | 18 + include/linux/iio/buffer.h | 16 + 8 files changed, 1154 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-) create mode 100644 drivers/iio/buffer/industrialio-buffer-dma.c create mode 100644 drivers/iio/buffer/industrialio-buffer-dmaengine.c create mode 100644 include/linux/iio/buffer-dma.h create mode 100644 include/linux/iio/buffer-dmaengine.h -- 2.1.4 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-iio" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
