Re: [PATCH] spi: Replace `dummy.nbytes` with `dummy.ncycles`

[Tudor Ambarus <tudor.ambarus@linaro.org>]

On 09.03.2023 10:38, Michael Walle wrote:
>> In an ideal world, where both the controller and the device talk about
>> dummy number of cycles, I would agree with you, buswidth and dtr should
>> not be relevant for the number of dummy cycles. But it seems that there
>> are old controllers (e.g. spi-hisi-sfc-v3xx.c, spi-mt65xx.c, spi-mxic.c)
>> that support buswidths > 1 and work only with dummy nbytes, they are not
>> capable of specifying a smaller granularity (ncycles). Thus the older
>> controllers would have to convert the dummy ncycles to dummy nbytes.
>> Since mixed transfer modes are a thing (see jesd251, it talks about
>> 4S-4D-4D), where single transfer mode (S) can be mixed with double
>> transfer mode (D) for a command, the controller would have to guess the
>> buswidth and dtr of the dummy. Shall they replicate the buswidth and dtr
>> of the address or of the data? There's no rule for that.
> 
> But in the end that doesn't matter because they are just dummy clock
> cycles and the mode will only affect the data/address/command. Therefore,
> the controller is free to choose the mode that suits it best.
>  > But that begs the question, is ncycles in regard to DTR or SDR? That is,
> are you counting just one type of edges or both the falling and rising
> edges. The smallest granularity would be ncycles in regard of DTR. To me,
> it's not obvious what the SEMPER Nano Flash [1] uses. I'd say we choose
> the smallest granularty in spi-mem to be future proof and maybe provide
> some spi-mem helper to help setting the cycles for SDR/DTR. As an example,
> if you want to wait 4 cycles in SDR you'd have ncycles=8 in spi-mem.
> 

No, we can't invent our own measuring units. We have cycles and half 
cycles (regardless of the transfer mode used (STR, DTR)).

> So you won't need the mode nor the dtr property.
> 
> -michael
> 
> [1] 
> https://www.infineon.com/dgdl/Infineon-S25FS256T_256Mb_SEMPER_Nano_Flash_Quad_SPI_1.8V-DataSheet-v01_00-EN.pdf?fileId=8ac78c8c80027ecd0180740c5a46707a