Hi Jean:
CC's trimmed...
* Jean Delvare <khali at linux-fr.org> [2005-08-12 08:02:10 +0200]:
> > > My experimental patch follows. I have enabled the I2C block read
> > > function for all VIA south bridges, so that it can be tested on all
> > > chips. I'll restrict that after the test phase, of course.
> >
> > I fired it up on one of the older chipsets...
> >
> > # lspci
> > (...)
> > 00:07.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C596 ISA [Mobile South] (rev 23)
> > (...)
> > 00:07.3 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C596 Power Management (rev 30)
>
> Oh, you do have one of these old 596 chips. Interesting. Could you
Heh, you noticed. I wasn't holding back any info, I just picked up another
couple older boards recently. ;)
> possibly take a look at the i2c-viapro driver and comment on that part:
>
> if ((pci_read_config_word(pdev, id->driver_data, &vt596_smba)) ||
> !(vt596_smba & 0x1)) {
> /* try 2nd address and config reg. for 596 */
> if (id->device == PCI_DEVICE_ID_VIA_82C596_3 &&
> !pci_read_config_word(pdev, SMBBA2, &vt596_smba) &&
> (vt596_smba & 0x1)) {
> smb_cf_hstcfg = 0x84;
>
> It looks like a hack to me, and I was wondering if we could clean it up
> (possibly by using pci quirks). I've not studied the problem in details
> yet, but comments and help would be welcome, and the fact that you do
> have a chip for testing will help anyway :)
I'm not sure what you don't like about it. I can't see what a PCI quirk
would have to do with it, either.
[...]
> Oh well, even if we were using interrupts instead of polling, the block
> transactions are still better as they are still twice as fast, would
> generate less interrupts, and are generally less CPU-intensive. That
> being said, I plan to implement interrupts in i2c-viapro at a later
> time. I have no idea how to do that, but I'll take a look at what you
> did in your i2c-i801 reimplementation, it should help. I simply seem to
> remember that you expected problems for block transactions in interrupt
> more, and don't know why exactly.
It's just that I had no good way to test it. I thought I had a client
that would accept the (SMBus) block read commands, but it just wasn't
reliable (even with the old driver). Worse, it would lock up the bus
so hard that I had to power cycle.
So, I gave up on that for lack of a better way to test it.
> Maybe we can use interrupts for short commands and polling for big
> transactions. I see no technical problem doing that - although this
> would make the driver larger and more complex.
Sure it's possible. Maybe I should do that with i2c-i801.
> BTW, it would be great if you could finalize your i2c-i801
> reimplementation so that we can add it to Linux 2.6. I remember it gave
> me much better performance than the original one, and the code was
> looking much nicer as well.
Yeah, it would be nice if I had the time (and some better equipment).
Regards,
--
Mark M. Hoffman
mhoffman at lightlink.com
