Re: [PATCH v3 0/6] Support ROHM BU27034 ALS sensor

[Andy Shevchenko <andriy.shevchenko@linux.intel.com>]

On Mon, Mar 06, 2023 at 11:15:10AM +0200, Matti Vaittinen wrote:
> Support ROHM BU27034 ALS sensor
> 
> This series adds support for ROHM BU27034 Ambient Light Sensor.
> 
> The BU27034 has configurable gain and measurement (integration) time
> settings. Both of these have inversely proportional relation to the
> sensor's intensity channel scale.
> 
> Many users only set the scale, which means that many drivers attempt to
> 'guess' the best gain+time combination to meet the scale. Usually this
> is the biggest integration time which allows setting the requested
> scale. Typically, increasing the integration time has better accuracy
> than increasing the gain, which often amplifies the noise as well as the
> real signal.
> 
> However, there may be cases where more responsive sensors are needed.
> So, in some cases the longest integration times may not be what the user
> prefers. The driver has no way of knowing this.
> 
> Hence, the approach taken by this series is to allow user to set both
> the scale and the integration time with following logic:
> 
> 1. When scale is set, the existing integration time is tried to be
>    maintained as a first priority.
>    1a) If the requested scale can't be met by current time, then also
>        other time + gain combinations are searched. If scale can be met
>        by some other integration time, then the new time may be applied.
>        If the time setting is common for all channels, then also other
>        channels must be able to maintain their scale with this new time
>        (by changing their gain). The new times are scanned in the order
>        of preference (typically the longest times first).
>    1b) If the requested scale can be met using current time, then only
>        the gain for the channel is changed.
> 
> 2. When the integration time change - scale is tried to be maintained.
>    When integration time change is requested also gain for all impacted
>    channels is adjusted so that the scale is not changed, or is chaned
>    as little as possible. This is different from the RFCv1 where the
>    request was rejected if suitable gain couldn't be found for some
>    channel(s).
> 
> This logic is simple. When total gain (either caused by time or hw-gain)
> is doubled, the scale gets halved. Also, the supported times are given a
> 'multiplier' value which tells how much they increase the total gain.
> 
> However, when I wrote this logic in bu27034 driver, I made quite a few
> errors on the way - and driver got pretty big. As I am writing drivers
> for two other sensors (RGB C/IR + flicker BU27010 and RGB C/IR BU27008)
> with similar gain-time-scale logic I thought that adding common helpers
> for these computations might be wise. I hope this way all the bugs will
> be concentrated in one place and not in every individual driver ;)
> 
> Hence, this series also intriduces IIO gain-time-scale helpers
> (abbreviated as gts-helpers) + a couple of KUnit tests for the most
> hairy parts.
> 
> I can't help thinking that there should've been simpler way of computing
> the gain-time-scale conversions. Also, pretty good speed improvements
> might be available if some of the do_div()s could be replaced by >>.
> This, however, is not a priority for my light-sensor use-case where
> speed demands are not that big.
> 
> Finally, these added helpers do provide some value also for drivers
> which only:
>  a) allow gain change
>   or
>  b) allow changing both the time and gain but so that the time-change is
>     not reflected in register values.
> 
> For a) we provide the gain - selector (register value) table format +
> selector to gain look-ups, gain <-> scale conversions and the available
> scales helpers.
> 
> For latter case we also provide the time-tables, and actually all the
> APIs should be usable by setting the time multiplier to 1. (not testeted
> thoroughly though).

A few comments can still be applied here.
Can you comment on the discussion against the previous version?

-- 
With Best Regards,
Andy Shevchenko