About rounding in the PWM framework [Was: Re: [PATCH v5] gpio: pca953x: Add Maxim MAX7313 PWM support]

Uwe Kleine-König
2020-01-21T14:23:06Z

Hello Thierry,

On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 01:56:07PM +0100, Thierry Reding wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 03:44:57PM +0100, Uwe Kleine-König wrote:
> > Yeah, it's something like clk_round_rate that I want in the end. And to
> > make it actually workable the IMHO only sane approach is to allow
> > rounding in one direction without limit. And as pwm_apply_state() should
> > be consistent with pwm_round_state() the former must round without
> > limit, too.
>
> Agreed on the point that both pwm_round_state() and pwm_apply_state()
> should do the same rounding. In fact, in most cases I'd expect drivers
> to implement the bulk of ->apply() and ->round() in the same function
> that basically constructs the new state that will be applied to the
> hardware in ->apply() but will be returned from ->round().
>
> I'm not so sure about rounding without limit, though. I think it makes
> sense to allow rounding to happen if you can match things closely enough
> for it not to matter in most cases.

The problem is to define "close enough". And if we can agree on some
definition, I wouldn't want to implement this policy in each and every
driver. That's why I think implementing something easy like "always
round down" is the right way for the lowlevel drivers. Allowing to round
in both directions makes working with pwm_round_rate quite a bit more
difficult, as does imposing a limit.

With that the PWM core could implement a policy uniformly for all
lowlevel drivers in a single place. You could even implement an API
function that picks the available period that is nearest to the
requested value.

> Strictly speaking we're already breaking use-cases that require a
> fixed period because there's currently no way for consumers to
> determine what the exact state is that is going to get applied.
> Consumers could read back the state, but we already know that that
> doesn't yield the correct result for some drivers.

Currently this is true for all drivers as the core caches the value that
was last set and a driver cannot give any feedback.

> Also, in practice, for the large majority of use-cases the exact period
> doesn't matter as long as the actual numbers are close enough to the
> requested values and the duty cycle/period ratio is about the same as
> what was requested.

Can you describe which policy you think should be implemented in
pwm_apply_state()?

> [...]
> That still means that we'll be ignoring mismatches between fixed-period
> producers and variable-period consumers. Allowing producers to overwrite
> whatever is passed in (without potentially being able to get anywhere
> near the requested values) is making it too easy to get things wrong,
> don't you think?

A sharp knife is a great tool. Of course you can hurt yourself or others
with it. But does that convince you to cut your vegetables with a
dull-edged knife?

> > > However, ignoring period settings because the controller supports only a
> > > fixed period seems a bit of an extreme.
> >
> > So the setting I want is:
> >
> > if (request.period < HW_PERIOD)
> > fail();
> >
> > and with the reasoning above, that's the only sensible thing (apart from
> > the revered policy of rounding up and so failing for requested periods
> > that are bigger than the implementable period).
>
> But that's just as arbitrary as anything else. request.period ==
> HW_PERIOD - 1 might be an entirely fine setting in many cases.

Ack. Technically it's arbitrary as anything else, exactly my point. But
among the many arbitrary policies it is I think one of the very few that
can easily be worked with and allows to let a consumer make an informed
choice without jumping through more hoops than necessary.

Best regards
Uwe

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