Re: [PATCH 06/10] ALSA: axd: add basic files for sending/receiving axd cmds

Mark Brown
2015-08-29T10:18:38Z

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On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 04:40:09PM +0100, Qais Yousef wrote:
> On 08/26/2015 08:16 PM, Mark Brown wrote:
> >On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 01:39:15PM +0100, Qais Yousef wrote:

> >>+unsigned long axd_cmd_get_datain_address(struct axd_cmd *cmd)
> >>+{
> >>+ struct axd_dev *axd = container_of(cmd, struct axd_dev, cmd);
> >>+
> >>+ return (unsigned long) axd->buf_base_m;
> >>+}
> >What's going on with these casts?

> As with the other cases. buf_base_m is void * __iomem but we want to do some
> arithmatic to help AXD start up and understand where it needs to run. I
> agree they don't look nice and if I can avoid them I'd be happy to do so.

C supports poinnter arithmetic...

> >>+static inline void axd_set_flag(unsigned int *flag, unsigned int value)
> >>+{
> >>+ *flag = value;
> >>+ smp_wmb(); /* guarantee smp ordering */
> >>+}

> >>+static inline unsigned int axd_get_flag(unsigned int *flag)
> >>+{
> >>+ smp_rmb(); /* guarantee smp ordering */
> >>+ return *flag;
> >>+}

> >Please use a normal locking construct rather than hand rolling
> >something, or alternatively introduce new generic operations. The fact
> >that you're hand rolling these things that have no driver specific
> >content is really worrying in terms of their safety.

> I need to check atomic_ops.txt again but I think atomic_t is not always smb
> safe. I definitely was running on a version of Meta archicture in the past
> where atomic_t wasn't always smp safe.

> I'll check if the rules have changed or something new was introduced to deal
> with this.

It is true that when using atomic_t with multiprocessor you still need
memory barriers but that doesn't mean atomics bring no benefit. But
that's not really the point here - the point is the more general one
that the whole idea of open coding memory barrier concurrency constructs
doesn't look great. It makes the code much more complex and error prone
compared to using normal locking and other concurrency constructs (which
Linux has a rich set of).

If we really need performance then it can make sense but I'm not seeing
anything here that appears to motivate this. In general all the
concurrency code looks much more complex than I would expect.

> >>+#define PIPE_STARTED 1
> >>+#define PIPE_RUNNING 2

> >Why is the case with in place buffers not a simple zero iteration loop?

> This is important when AXD is not consuming the data through I2S and
> returning them to Linux. What we're trying to deal with here is the firmware
> processed some data and expects Linux to consume whatever it has sent back
> to it. We want to ensure that if the user suddenly stopped consuming this
> data by closing the pipe to drop anything we receive back from AXD otherwise
> the workqueue would block indefinitely waiting for the user that disappeared
> to consume it causing a deadlock.

That doesn't seem to address the question...

> >>+ axd_platform_irq_ack();

> >When would this ever be called anywhere else? Just inline it (and it's
> >better practice to only ack things we handle...).

> It wouldn't be called anywhere else but its implementation could be platform
> specific that's why it's abstracted. At the moment it does nothing now we're
> using MIPS but we shouldn't assume that this will always be the case.
> The main purpose of this function is to deassert the interrupt line if the
> way interrrupts are wired for that platform required so. In the past we were
> running in hardware where interrupts are sent through special slave port and
> the interrupt required to be acked or deasserted.

This sounds like something that should be in the interrupt controller
implementation not the leaf driver, just remove this unless you're
actually abstracting something.

> >>+ flags = axd_platform_lock();
> >>+ int_status = ioread32(&cmd->message->int_status);
> >>+ iowrite32(0, &cmd->message->int_status);
> >>+
> >>+ if (!int_status)
> >>+ goto out;

> >This should cause us to return IRQ_NONE.

> I don't think it's necessary. It could happen that AXD sent a DATAIN
> interrupt and shortly after sent DATAOUT interrupt but the handler was
> running before the DATAOUT case is handled causing both interrupts to be
> handled in one go but the handler could be called again to find out that
> there's nothing to do.

Please implement your interrupt handler properly so that the genirq
error handling code can work and it is robust against things going
wrong in future. It's not like it's a huge amount of complex code.

> >>+ if (int_status & AXD_INT_ERROR) {
> >>+ struct axd_dev *axd = container_of(cmd, struct axd_dev, cmd);
> >>+ int error = ioread32(&cmd->message->error);
> >>+
> >>+ pr_debug("<---- Received error interrupt\n");
> >>+ switch (error) {
> >>+ default:
> >>+ case 0:
> >>+ break;

> >We just ignore these?

> Case 0 doesn't indicate anything anymore. I can print a warning about
> unexpected error code for the default case.

That's more what I'd expect, yes.

> >>+ /*
> >>+ * if we could lock the semaphore, then we're guaranteed that the
> >>+ * current rd_idx is valid and ready to be used. So no need to verify
> >>+ * that the status of the descriptor at rd_idx is valid.
> >>+ */
> >>+ spin_lock(&desc_ctrl->rd_lock);

> >It really feels like this locking is all complicated and fragile. I'm
> >not entirely sure the optimisation is worth it - are we really sending
> >compressed audio at such a high rate that it's worth having concurrency
> >handling that's hard to think about?

> This is similar to how the bufferq implementation work. What is the other
> alternative to this? We do want this to be as fast as possible.

Why not just reuse the bufferq implementation if that's what you want to
use? More generally most audio ring buffers just keep track of the last
place read or written and don't bother with semaphores (why do we even
need to block?). It's not just the semaphore you're using here but also
some non-atomic variables accessed with memory barriers and mutexes all
scattered over a very large block of code. It is far too much effort to
reason about what the locking scheme is supposed to be here to determine
if it is safe, and that's not going to get any easier when reviewing
future changes.

Trying to make something overly optimised at the expense of
comprehensibility and maintainability is not good, if there is a
pressing performance reason then by all means but that needs to be
something concrete not just a statement that we want things to run
faster.

> Maybe my use of the semaphore count to keep track of how many descriptors
> are available and cause the caller to block is the confusing part? Would
> better comments help?

Documentation would help somewhat but I really think this is far too
complicated for what it's trying to do. As far as I can tell all this
is doing is simple FIFO type tracking of where the last write and last
read in the buffer were (which is what most audio drivers do with their
data buffers). That should be something that can be done with something
more like just a single lock.

Based on some of your other comments I think this may have been
overengineered for some other APIs you were implementing but with the
ALSA API it should be possible to dramatically simplify it.

> >>+ /*
> >>+ * Based on the defined axd_pipe->buf_size and number of input pipes
> >>+ * supported by the firmware, we calculate the number of descriptors we
> >>+ * need to use using this formula:
> >>+ *
> >>+ * axd_pipe->buf_size * num_desc = total_size / num_inputs
> >>+ */
> >>+ num_desc = total_size / (cmd->num_inputs * axd_pipe->buf_size);

> >I'm not sure that was an especially tricky line of code to follow... am
> >I missing something here?

> The driver receive a pointer to a contiguous buffer area that it needs to
> divide it into buffers based on its size, number of pipes in the system, and
> the desired buffer size.

That is what I think the code is doing but apparently it's sufficiently
complex that it needs a five line comment including a rewritten version
of the equation?

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