Re: [RFC net-next 15/15] net: lora: Add Semtech SX1301

Andreas Färber
2018-07-03T16:40:41Z

Am 03.07.2018 um 17:31 schrieb Mark Brown:
> On Tue, Jul 03, 2018 at 05:09:38PM +0200, Andreas Färber wrote:
>> Am 03.07.2018 um 16:50 schrieb Mark Brown:
>>> A register map would work just as well here, we already have plenty of
>>> devices that abstract at this level (most obviously the I2C/SPI devices
>>> that use it to offer both interfaces with a single core driver).
>
>> The address and data registers together form a two-byte SPI message!
>
>> It is transmitted by writing to the CS register.
>
>> The received data is afterwards available in another register.
>
> Right, but it seems from the code that the hardware understands that
> it's formatting register I/O and not just shifting in and out a byte
> stream which is what a SPI controller does. I'd not be surprised to
> learn that the register you're calling a chip select register is a
> strobe that initiates the transfer (and that this may be some of the
> difficulty you're having with handling it in the way the framework
> expects), the pattern with writing 1 followed immediately by 0 is a bit
> of a flag here.

Yeah, the current implementation assumes exactly that. :)

> I've seen such before hardware where I know it was intentionally
> designed that way so it wouldn't be totally surprising.

If we don't implement a spi_controller here, then IIUC we can't have
multiple spi_device implementations for the devices on the receiving
end, as they rely on a spi_controller for their APIs.

Do you have an alternative solution for abstraction? A regmap would seem
to require putting everything into a monolithic SX1301 driver despite
those connected chipsets actually being regular, external SPI chips that
could also be attached to non-SX1301 SPI masters.

Regards,
Andreas

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