[alsa-devel] [PATCH 0/27]: ASoC: rsnd: add Renesas Gen2 DMAEngine support

[Lars-Peter Clausen]

On 01/28/2014 02:05 PM, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 12:37:43PM +0000, Mark Brown wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 01:06:29PM +0100, Lars-Peter Clausen wrote:
>>
>>> The virt_dma helper functions already take care of some of the cyclic
>>> specific details. And more can probably be added. E.g. what comes to mind is
>>> the tracking of whether a descriptor is cyclic and which segment of the
>>> descriptor to submit next. All users of virt_dma already implement these in
>>> almost the same fashion. So this would not only to allow to factor out the
>>> handling for the cyclic case, but also for the non cyclic case. And for all
>>> users of those helpers cyclic support would essentially be free.
>>
>> OK, I had a brief look and that does seem like the way forwards - I had
>> been remembering the last time this was discussed when the DMA guys were
>> pretty uncomfortable with the idea of doing things there but it seems
>> things are different now.
> 
> I don't want virt_dma to do any tracking of which part of the descriptor
> is to be submitted next, because that needlessly makes virt_dma harder to
> use on hardware which you can generate the scatterlist in memory and have
> the hardware walk it, only notifying when it reaches the end of the list.

Or maybe make it a lib orthogonal to or on top of virt_dma. A soft sg lib
for devices that don't have hardware support for scatterlist is definitely
something that would be beneficial to the dmaengine framework as there are
quite a few of those driver which all have more or less the same code over
and over again. With such a lib cyclic support comes for free.

- Lars