Re: [PATCH RFC 2/6] dmaengine: Make of_dma_request_slave_channel pass a cookie to of_xlate

[Konrad Dybcio <konrad.dybcio@oss.qualcomm.com>]

On 8/5/25 1:51 AM, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 02, 2025 at 02:37:54PM +0200, Konrad Dybcio wrote:
>> On 8/1/25 2:00 PM, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
>>> On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 02:37:54PM -0400, Frank Li wrote:
>>>> On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 09:04:17PM +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
>>>>> On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 12:39:43PM -0400, Frank Li wrote:
>>>>>> On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 11:33:29AM +0200, Konrad Dybcio wrote:
>>>>>>> From: Konrad Dybcio <konrad.dybcio@oss.qualcomm.com>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The DMA subsystem attempts to make it theoretically possible to pair
>>>>>>> any DMA block with any user. While that's convenient from a
>>>>>>> codebase sanity perspective, some blocks are more intertwined.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> One such case is the Qualcomm GENI, where each wrapper contains a
>>>>>>> number of Serial Engine instances, each one of which can be programmed
>>>>>>> to support a different protocol (such as I2C, I3C, SPI, UART, etc.).
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The GPI DMA it's designed together with, needs to receive the ID of the
>>>>>>> protocol that's in use, to adjust its behavior accordingly. Currently,
>>>>>>> that's done through passing that ID through device tree, with each
>>>>>>> Serial Engine expressed NUM_PROTOCOL times, resulting in terrible
>>>>>>> dt-bindings that are full of useless copypasta.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> In a step to cut down on that, let the DMA user give the engine driver
>>>>>>> a hint at request time.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Signed-off-by: Konrad Dybcio <konrad.dybcio@oss.qualcomm.com>
>>>>>>> ---

[...]

>> So.. do you folks want me to alter the patch in any way?
> 
> I think the runtime PM issue is orthogonal to the problem this series
> addresses. It can be addressed separately.
> 
> That being said, I'm not a big fan of passing a void pointer to
> .of_xlate() to carry device-specific information, in a device-specific
> format. This seems prone to mismatch between clients and DMA engines.
> .of_xlate() also seems the wrong place to do this. It would be cleaner
> if we could use another operation, such as dmaengine_slave_config() for
> instance.

Right, I noticed that the drivers in question already apparently do the
very same thing (passing data through a voidptr), inside slave_config
(via the peripheral_config/_size fields)..
But that doesn't solve the issue this series is trying to tackle, since
every DMA consumer driver passes its own structure (or NULL).

My immediate idea is to add yet another field, but that's lame. The other
immediate idea would be to put an `u8 variant` at the start of all of 
these structs ("we have tagged enums at home"), but that's lame *and*
dangerous.

Ideas?

Konrad