For Intel machine drivers, all BE dailinks use .no_pcm = 1 (explicit setting) .nonatomic = 0 (implicit).
that was my question, how is it implicit? Should be explicitly set, right?
implicit behavior with C, if you don't set a field its value is zero...
All FE dailinks use .no_pcm = 0 (implicit) .nonatomic = 1 (explicit setting)
So the question is: is there any issue with sending an IPC in a DAI trigger callback?
Sorry looks like we diverged, orignal question was can we do heavy tasks in trigger, the answer is no, unless one uses nonatomic flag which was added so that people can do that work with DSPs like sending IPCs.. Maybe we should add heavy slimbus/soundwire handling to it too...?
I don't think the answer is as clear as you describe it Vinod.
The .nonatomic field is at the BE dailink level.
Unless I am missing something, I don't see anything that lets me set a .nonatomic property at the *DAI* level.
I would say that was a miss in original design, it should have been set at dai level or at least allowed to propagate from dai level setting.
Now we are allowed to set it at dai_link but it is governed by dai behaviour (DSP based DAI etc...)
Actually, there was one big piece I overlooked. The whole DPCM BE operation is *always* tied with FE's. That is, the nonatomic flag is completely ignored for BE, but just follows what FE sets up.
And that's the very confusing point when reviewing the code. You cannot know whether it's written for non-atomic context or not. This means that it's also error-prone; the code that assumes the operation in a certain mode might mismatch with the bound FE.
So, ideally, both FE and BE should set the proper nonatomic flags, and have a consistency check with WARN_ON() at the run time.
Sorry Takashi, I am not following. Are you asking me to add a .nonatomic flag in all the exiting BEs along with a WARN_ON?
I can do this, but that's a sure way to trigger massive amounts of user-reported "regression in kernel 5.1x". Is this really what you want?
Also I don't understand how this would help with the specific problem raised in this patch: can we yes/no do something 'heavy' in a *DAI* callback? What is the definition of 'heavy'?
And last, I am not sure it's always the case that a BE follows the FE configuration. We've had cases of BE->BE loopbacks where the host doesn't see or configured the data.