Re: [PATCH 07/16] spi: bcm63xx-hsspi: Add polling mode support

[Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org>]

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On Wed, Jan 11, 2023 at 12:13:43PM -0800, William Zhang wrote:

> Thanks for the explanation. I saw the spi-uniphier.c and spi-bcm2835.c doing
> the trick you mentioned(thanks Kursad for pointing out).  In our case, even
> the maximum fifo size usage(512bytes), the polling still have better
> performance than interrupt. The MTD test result included in this patch is
> based on maximum fifo usage. So there is no benefit to switch to interrupt
> based on transfer size.

> Does the spi framework has any requirement on how much time that the
> driver's transfer_one function can spend?  I can see the polling function
> might take quite some time in busy loop if the clock is low, for example, at
> 100Hz(slowest clock this controller can go), it takes 512x8/100Hz ~= 41ms to
> complete.  If this is something in concern,  I can do the interrupt switch
> based on a time limit value if interrupt is available.

There's no fixed limit, some hardware just doesn't have DMA.  Some
doesn't even have interrupts which is even better.  If there's always a
clear benefit for using PIO then just do that, perhaps creating a sysfs
hook to allow people to switch to DMA if they need it (rather than
requiring people to update their DT, this is really a runtime
performance tradeoff rather than a description of the hardware).  If
there's a point at which the performance is very similar then it's
probably worth switching to DMA there to lower the CPU usage, but if
it's always faster to use PIO then just defaulting to PIO seems like the
best option.

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