Re: [PATCH RFC v2 1/8] spi: dt-bindings: spi-peripheral-props: add spi-offloads property

[Nuno Sá <noname.nuno@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2024-05-30 at 20:18 +0100, Conor Dooley wrote:
> On Wed, May 29, 2024 at 10:07:37AM +0200, Nuno Sá wrote:
> > On Sun, 2024-05-26 at 18:35 +0100, Conor Dooley wrote:
> > > On Thu, May 23, 2024 at 02:15:35PM +0200, Nuno Sá wrote:
> > > > On Wed, 2024-05-22 at 19:24 +0100, Conor Dooley wrote:
> 
> > > > Taking the
> > > > trigger (PWM) as an example and even when it is directly connected with the
> > > > offload
> > > > block, the peripheral still needs to know about it. Think of sampling
> > > > frequency...
> > > > The period of the trigger signal is strictly connected with the sampling
> > > > frequency of
> > > > the peripheral for example. So I see 2 things:
> > > > 
> > > > 1) Enabling/Disabling the trigger could be easily done from the peripheral
> > > > even
> > > > with
> > > > the resource in the spi engine. I think David already has some code in the
> > > > series
> > > > that would make this trivial and so having the property in the spi controller
> > > > brings
> > > > no added complexity.
> > > > 
> > > > 2) Controlling things like the trigger period/sample_rate. This could be
> > > > harder
> > > > to do
> > > > over SPI (or making it generic enough) so we would still need to have the
> > > > same
> > > > property on the peripheral (even if not directly connected to it). I kind of
> > > > agree
> > > > with David that having the property both in the peripheral and controller is
> > > > a
> > > > bit
> > > > weird.
> > > 
> > > Can you explain what you mean by "same property on the peripheral"? I
> > > would expect a peripheral to state its trigger period (just like how it
> > > states the max frequency) and for the trigger period not to appear in
> > > the controller.
> > > 
> > 
> > Just have the same 'pwms' property on both the controller and peripheral...
> 
> Yeah, no... Opinion unchanged since my last message.
> 

...

> > 
> 
> If only we had another user... I suppose you lads are the market leader
> in these kinds of devices. If I did happen to know if Microchip was
> working on anything similar (which I don't, I work on FPGAs not these
> kinds of devices) I couldn't even tell you. I suppose I could ask around
> and see. Do you know if TI is doing anything along these lines?
> 

Unfortunately, no idea.

> > > Part of me says "sure, hook the DMAs up to the devices, as that's what
> > > happens for other IIO devices" but at the same time I recognise that the
> > > DMA isn't actually hooked up like that and the other IIO devices I see
> > > like that are all actually on the SoC, rather than connected over SPI.
> > 
> > Yeah, I know... But note (but again, only for ADI designs) that the DMA role is
> > solely for carrying the peripheral data. It is done like this so everything works
> > in
> > HW and there's no need for SW to deal with the samples at all. I mean, only the
> > userspace app touches the samples.
> > 
> > TBH, the DMA is the bit that worries me the most as it may be overly complex to
> > share
> > buffers (using dma-buf or something else) from the spi controller back to
> > consumers
> > of it (IIO in this case). And I mean sharing in a way that there's no need to
> > touch
> > the buffers.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> > Maybe having an offload dedicated API (through spi) to get/share a DMA handle
> > would
> > be acceptable. Then we could add support to "import" it in the IIO core. Then it
> > would be up to the controller to accept or not to share the handle (in some cases
> > the
> > controller could really want to have the control of the DMA transfers).
> 
> Yeah, that is about what I was thinking. I wasn't expecting the spi code
> to grow handing for dmabuf or anything like that, just a way for the
> offload consumer to say "yo, can you tell me what dma buffer I can
> use?". Unless (until?) there's some controller that wants to manage it,
> I think that'd be sufficient?

Yeah, I could see some kind of submit_request() API with some kind of completion
handler for this. But on the IIO side the DMA code is not that straight (even getting
more complex with dma-buf's) so I can't really tell how the whole thing would look
like. But may be something to look at.

- Nuno Sá