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SubjectRe: [RFC PATCH 00/21] IIO: Channel registration rework, buffer chardev combining and rewrite of triggers as 'virtual' irq_chips.
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On Monday 04 April 2011, Jonathan Cameron wrote:
> On 04/04/11 13:02, Michael Hennerich wrote:
> >> 2) Flattening together of (some) of the chardevs (buffer related ones).
> >> As Arnd pointed out, there is really a use case for having multiple
> >> watershed type events from ring buffers. Much better to have a
> >> single one (be that at a controllable point). Firstly this removes
> >> the need for the event escalation code. Second, this single 'event'
> >> can then be indicated to user space purely using polling on the
> >> access chrdev. This approach does need an additional attribute to
> >> tell user space what the poll succeeding indicates (tbd).
> >>
> >> I haven't for now merged the ring handling with the more general
> >> event handling as Arnd suggested. This is for two reasons
> >> 1) It's much easier to debug this done in a couple of steps
> >> 2) The approach Arnd suggested may work well, but it is rather
> >> different to how other bits of the kernel pass event type data
> >> to user space. It's an interesting idea, but I'd rather any
> >> discussion of that approach was separate from the obviously
> >> big gains seen here.
> >>
> >> Patches 4, 5, 6, 7, 17
> >>
> > I appreciate the removal of the buffer event chardev. Adding support for
> > poll is also a good thing to do.
> > However support for a blocking read might also fit some use cases.
> Good point. I guess blocking on any content and poll for the watershead
> gives the best of both worlds. The blocking read is more down to the
> individual implementations than a core feature though - so one to do
> after this patch set.

You should implement both blocking and non-blocking read in the core, IMO.
This is how pipes generally work and what the opn()/read() man pages say it
works.

> >> 3) Reworking the triggering infrastructure to use 'virtual' irq_chips
> >> This approach was suggested by Thomas Gleixner.
> >> Before we had explicit trigger consumer lists. This made for a very
> >> clunky implementation when we considered moving things over to
> >> threaded interrupts. Thomas pointed out we were reinventing the
> >> wheel and suggested more or less what we have here (I hope ;)
> >>
> > Using threaded interrupts, greatly reduces use of additional workqueues
> > and excessive interrupt enable and disables.
> There is a nasty side issue here. What do we do if we are getting triggers
> faster than all of the consumers can work at? Right now things tend to
> stall. I think we just want to gracefully stop the relevant trigger
> if this happens. I'm not quite sure how we can notify userspace that this
> has happened... Perhaps POLLERR?

I'd say use POLLERR to signal to user space that something bad has happened,
then return the status in an ioctl().

> >> Patches 9 and 10 are minor rearrangements of code in the one
> >> driver I know of where the physical interrupt line for events
> >> is the same as that for data ready signals (though not at the
> >> same time).
> >>
> > I wouldn't consider this being a corner case. I know quite a few devices
> > that trigger data availability,
> > and other events from the same physical interrupt line, and they may do
> > it at the same time.
> If they do it at the same time things may get a bit nasty. Things are somewhat
> simpler after some of the later patches, as the irq requests are entirely
> handled in the drivers. Thus the driver could have one interrupt handler.
> The restriction will be that it would only be able to do nested irq calls
> limiting us to not having a top half for anything triggered from such an
> interrupt. This is because identifying whether we have a dataready or
> other event will require querying the device and hence sleeping. Note
> the sysfs trigger driver will also have this restriction (as posted yesterday).
>
> For devices where they share the line but cannot happen at the same time I'd
> prefer to do what we have in the lis3l02dq and completely separate the two
> uses of the interrupt line.

Can't you just have callback functions in the core that get called for a
specific event, and let the device driver take care of seperating the
sources?


Arnd



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