Subject: Re: Tearing down DMA transfer setup after DMA client has finished
To: Vinod Koul <vinod.koul@intel.com>, Sebastian Frias <sf84@laposte.net>
Cc: Mans Rullgard <mans@mansr.com>, Russell King <linux@arm.linux.org.uk>,
        dmaengine@vger.kernel.org, Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org>,
        Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Linux ARM <linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org>,
        Jon Mason <jdmason@kudzu.us>, Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org>,
        Lars-Peter Clausen <lars@metafoo.de>, Lee Jones <lee.jones@linaro.org>,
        Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>,
        Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>,
        Maxime Ripard <maxime.ripard@free-electrons.com>,
        Dave Jiang <dave.jiang@intel.com>,
        Peter Ujfalusi <peter.ujfalusi@ti.com>,
        Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz <b.zolnierkie@samsung.com>,
        Thibaud Cornic <thibaud_cornic@sigmadesigns.com>
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From: Mason <slash.tmp@free.fr>
Message-ID: <ec33d3f0-6474-2b13-8a26-077ce3785d31@free.fr>
Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2016 18:34:15 +0100
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On 09/12/2016 18:17, Vinod Koul wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 09, 2016 at 11:25:57AM +0100, Sebastian Frias wrote:
>>
>> What concrete solution do you propose?
> 
> I have already proposed two solutions.
> 
> A) Request a channel only when you need it. Obviously we can't do virtual
> channels with this (though we should still use virt-channels framework).
> The sbox setup and teardown can be done as part of channel request and
> freeup. PL08x already does this.
> 
> Downside is that we can only have as many consumers at a time as channels.
> 
> I have not heard any technical reason for not doing this apart from drivers
> grab the channel at probe, which is incorrect and needs to be fixed
> irrespective of the problem at hand.
> 
> This is my preferred option.

There is one important drawback with this solution. If a driver calls
dma_request_chan() when no channels are currently available, it will
get -EBUSY. If there were a flag in dma_request_chan to be put to
sleep (with timeout) until a channel is available, then it would
work. But busy waiting in the client driver is a waste of power.

Regards.