[alsa-devel] twl4030 latency update

[Peter Ujfalusi]

Hi Leonardo,

On 04/01/2014 12:41 PM, Leonardo Gabrielli wrote:
> Dear Peter,
> I actually managed to nearly halve the latency with McBSP2 and jackd with a
> little trick: requesting 4 channels audio. Of course two will be zero, but the
> FIFO will grow up more quick.

Yes, this is expected. The FIFO is lost (or word) based. If you have mono
audio, it is 1280 samples long, in stereo it is 640 samples with 4 channel it
can hold up to 320 samples.

> Outcome:
> 4 channels, 44100, 64 input --> jack --> output takes 10.1ms latency, i.e.:
> - 2 periods for input: 128 L/R frames
> - 1280 FIFO words / 4 channels = 320 frames
> Without the trick the latency was 17.4ms :)

What you can also try is to reduce the max_rx_thres to let's say 10 samples
(20 or 40 depending on the number of channels you are using). Keep the
max_tx_thres as you have been using.

> 
> CPU load as increased slightly in jackd, but of course any other jack client
> will stay the same assumed that the 2 fake extra channels are unused.
> 
> In this experiment sample size = 16-bit. If I try to default to 32bit nothing
> changes (so I assume the FIFO words are 32-bit wide and can contain either
> 16-bit zeropadded samples or 32, which I remember from the AM37xx tech guide
> but I'm too lazy to check again ;) )

Yes it is like that.

> Glitches may happen when some regular user tasks (scp, curl, ...) request some
> cpu. I may try the new 3.14 kernel with SCHED_DEADLINE to see if jackd and
> clients can really be not preempted by user tasks...
> 
> Best
> 
> Leonardo
> 
> 
> 
> On 26/03/2014 13:51, Peter Ujfalusi wrote:
>> On 03/26/2014 11:45 AM, Leonardo Gabrielli wrote:
>>> On 26/03/2014 09:26, Peter Ujfalusi wrote:
>>>> The McBSP2 FIFO will be always there. There's nothing can be done on that.
>>>> The
>>>> size on McBSP2 is 1280 words -> 640 stereo samples, ie ~29ms with 22050,
>>>> 14.5ms with 44100.
>>>>
>>>> If you are staying in element mode this means that it is granted that the
>>>> sample at the DMA pointer will out on the i2s line about the mentioned times.
>>>> This is the delay caused by the FIFO itself. From where the rest is coming
>>>> I'm
>>>> not really sure.
>>> BTW: I forgot to mention: the latency listed in my previous email is
>>> input+output (i.e. I record pulses from the beagleboard input jack and the
>>> delayed version to the beagleboard output jack). The twl4030 analog and
>>> digital loopback features have been of course disabled, in order to get the
>>> total latency due from A/D to D/A.
>> This means that the McBSP latency in worst case is 1280 + selected rx
>> threshold in words (so /2 in case of stereo.) If you lower the rx threshold
>> you decrease the latency on the capture side. On the playback side there's
>> nothing can be done.
>>
>>> So just to get confirm I understood the McBSP mechanism well: even though I
>>> can transfer to/from DMA samples in bursts of <threshold> length, each sample
>>> will always "travel along" the whole FIFO buffer length, (as if in a delay
>>> line) and thus they will always have 640samples delay?
>> On the playback side this is pretty much true. On capture side the threshold
>> means that DMA will read from FIFO when threshold amount is available in it.
>>
>>> Would it be possible to workaround this, e.g. by putting 4-channel audio
>>> frames instead of stereo frames in the FIFO (with 2 channels unused), in order
>>> to fill up the FIFO more quickly and have less latency? Or is it pure craze?
>> >From the FIFO McBSP takes data word by word. If you play stereo, you need to
>> have stereo data in the FIFO. You can not skip two words with McBSP.
>>
>> The thing I tried for playback and did not worked AFAIR:
>> In general the idea was to configure DMA to send threshold/channel to every
>> request while configuring the McBSP threshold register to be 1280 - threshold.
>> In case of threshold 80 (40 stereo samples) it would play out:
>> transfer 40 samples to FIFO per DMA request
>> assert the DMA request when we have space for 1260 (630 samples). The number
>> is just a guess, keeping 10 samples in FIFO sounds safe enough
>> This would keep the FIFO fill between 10 and 50 samples.
>> But this does not work, I think McBSP is counting the received words also and
>> deasserts the DMA request based on this count and not the FIFO level.
>>
>> Another thing which would be even more complicated is to play with the McBSP
>> threshold runtime. With the same 40 sample:
>> DMA is to transfer 40 samples per DMA requests.
>> start
>> 1. McBSP threshold to 80
>> 2. in dma interrupt callback McBSP threshold to 1260
>> 3. in McBSP warning interrupt (that we will be reaching the threshold soon)
>> back to 80
>> 4. goto 2
>>
>> If we could do the step between 3 and 4 within one sample time this might work
>> but as soon as you are late the thing will fail.
>>
>> I know this is working in realtime systems like in DSPs and non linux
>> systems...
>>
> 


-- 
Péter