Re: [PATCH v2 1/3] iio: light: Add driver for ap3216c

Jonathan Cameron
2019-03-09T17:33:53Z

On Mon, 4 Mar 2019 11:25:01 -0500
Sven Van Asbroeck <thesven73@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 3, 2019 at 9:38 AM Jonathan Cameron <jic23@kernel.org> wrote:
> >
> > Hmm. Just been thinking a bit about the events on here and wondered
> > if it is possible to mask them through careful use of the threshold
> > values - i.e. can we stop the hardware generating the interrupts for
> > the ones we don't want. It would be unusual for hardware to be
> > designed where this wasn't possible.
>
> Excellent point! People with power / battery constraints take a dim view of
> receiving interrupts when no-one wants them. So disabling them in h/w
> is definitely the way to go, if possible.
>
> And yes, this also makes a non-issue of thresh_en visibility concerns, if any.
>
> >
> > Alternatively if you have a scope or equivalent to verify if it is doing
> > these as a multi byte read and working that would be even better.
> > It is not uncommon for hardware to implement fairly standard i2c features
> > like this and not document them because they weren't what the test code
> > the docs writer got given does! (may not be true here of course)
>
> Or alternatively, the current chip rev supports undocumented multi-reads,
> and the next revision silently drops support, thereby breaking the driver...
> Been there, done that, got the T-shirt :(

Indeed it's a risk. Sadly hardware guys never have a 'we mustn't break
software' rule like we do for userspace!

Jonathan