[alsa-devel] [PATCH RFC 1/1] ASoC: fsl_ssi: Make fifo watermark and maxburst settings device tree options

[Nicolin Chen]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 08:56:31PM -0800, Caleb Crome wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 6:45 PM, Nicolin Chen <nicoleotsuka at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 01:26:24PM -0800, Caleb Crome wrote:
> >
> >> As for optimal settings, I finally came to a setting of 4 for depth &
> >> maxburst, which will result in more DMA requests, but it's the only
> >> way that works at 48kHz for me.  The default settings is 13 (15 - 2)
> >> for the ones of the 15 item fifo, which is a pretty dramatic
> >> difference.  I just don't know if other chips will behave badly in
> >> that case.
> >
> > What's your final configuration for TFWM0 bits, 4?
> 
> Yes, a value of 4 for my use case:  i.MX6 @ 768000 words/second (48khz
> * 16 channels).

4 means there are >= 4 empty slots in the FIFO, so there are no more
than 11 remaining data. This makes sense.

IIRC, the Freescale official BSP release for i.MX is used to set 6 to
TFWM0/1 in the old day, not sure about recent ones though. So I think
setting 4 to TFWM0/1 should work for most of cases. We may also let
others test it before merging it.

Actually a setting of 13 is much more risky in my opinion. It means
only two empty slots in the FIFO, so it might be easily to get under/
overflow if a DMA transaction gets delay somehow. The only benefit is
that DMA requests and interrupt (FIQ) can be reduced.