[ath9k-devel] [RFC/RFT 6/7] ath10k: add active htc ul pipe polling support

[Kalle Valo <kvalo@qca.qualcomm.com>]

Michal Kazior <michal.kazior@tieto.com> writes:

> Until now we depended solely on passive or lazy
> polling for tx completion.
>
> The passive was in htc rx handler. The lazy in
> htc_send_work(). The lazy would fire only if there
> are less than 50% resources free. However for HTT
> tx we have 2047 resources and we never used more
> than 512 (HTT_MAX_PENDING_TX).
>
> It is a good idea to have a timer that polls for
> tx completions "just in case". This could help if
> mac80211 is waiting for tx status and there's no
> tx/rx happening.
>
> Signed-off-by: Michal Kazior <michal.kazior@tieto.com>

I haven't tested your patches yet, but I'm a bit concerned about the
timer. Timers usually create problems of their own and using them wrong
affect power consumption.

I don't have time to read the patches in detail, but can you give a
short summary how the timer works? How often is it fired? What happens
when the data path is idle?

And is it absolutely necessary to use a timer? Can't we use tx
completions or some other existing event from firmware to accomplish the
same?

-- 
Kalle Valo