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Date: Thu, 30 May 2024 14:24:17 -0500
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Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC v2 1/8] spi: dt-bindings: spi-peripheral-props: add
 spi-offloads property
To: =?UTF-8?Q?Nuno_S=C3=A1?= <noname.nuno@gmail.com>,
 Conor Dooley <conor@kernel.org>
Cc: Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org>, Jonathan Cameron <jic23@kernel.org>,
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 Martin Sperl <kernel@martin.sperl.org>, linux-spi@vger.kernel.org,
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On 5/29/24 3:07 AM, Nuno Sá wrote:
> On Sun, 2024-05-26 at 18:35 +0100, Conor Dooley wrote:


>> It might be easy to do it this way right now, but be problematic for a
>> future device or if someone wants to chuck away the ADI provided RTL and
>> do their own thing for this device. Really it just makes me wonder if
>> what's needed to describe more complex data pipelines uses an of_graph,
>> just like how video pipelines are handled, rather than the implementation
>> of io-backends that don't really seem to model the flow of data.
>>
> 
> Yeah, backends is more for devices/soft-cores that extend the functionality of the
> device they are connected too. Like having DACs/ADCs hdl cores for connecting to high
> speed controllers. Note that in some cases they also manipulate or even create data
> but since they fit in IIO, having things like the DMA property in the hdl binding was
> fairly straight.
> 
> Maybe having an offload dedicated API (through spi) to get/share a DMA handle would
> be acceptable. Then we could add support to "import" it in the IIO core. Then it
> would be up to the controller to accept or not to share the handle (in some cases the
> controller could really want to have the control of the DMA transfers).

I could see this working for some SPI controllers, but for the AXI SPI Engine
+ DMA currently, the DMA has a fixed word size, so can't be used as a generic
DMA with arbitrary SPI xfers. For example, if the HDL is compiled with a 32-bit
word size, then even if we are reading 16-bit sample data, the DMA is going to
put it in a 32-bit slot. So one could argue that this is still doing some data
manipulation similar to the CRC checker example.

> 
> Not familiar enough with of_graph so can't argue about it but likely is something
> worth looking at.
> 
> - Nuno Sá
>>>

I did try implementing something using graph bindings when I first started
working on this, but it didn't seem to really give us any extra useful
information. It was just describing connections (endpoints) that I thought
we could just implicitly assume. After this discussion though, maybe worth
a second look. I'll have to think about it more.