[PATCH V3 1/2] of: Add generic device tree DMA helpers

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Thursday 14 June 2012, Jon Hunter wrote:

> > Generic DMACs can perform memory-to-memory DMA, USB DMACs cannot.
> > 
> > Generic DMACs can serve any slave (peripheral) request line on any their 
> > physical channel, USB DMACs only serve fixed USB controller instances. To 
> > configure (connect) a certain physical DMA channel to s specific 
> > peripheral request line, a certain value has to be written to a 
> > configuration register of that physical DMA channel.
> 
> Do you still need to specify a request line for the USB DMACs or are
> these fixed? In other words, what purpose would the DMA binding serve
> for the USB DMACs?

If I understood Guennadi right, the DMA engines are the same kind as the
other ones, so we really want to use the same bindings for each instance.

> > To add to complexity, on other SoCs (e.g., SuperH sh7724) some of generic 
> > DMACs (DMAC0) have external DMA request pins, others don't.
> 
> OMAP also has this. To me an request line going to an external pin can
> be handled in the same way as one going to a internal peripheral.
> However, what happens to that pin externally is a different story.

Right, I don't see a problem here with any of the proposed binding.

> > I'm sure there's more to that, but that's about the scope, that's 
> > currently supported or wants to be supported by the driver.
> > 
> > Currently we do the slave-switching in the following way: platform data 
> > for each DMAC instance references a table of supported peripherals with 
> > their IDs and configuration register values. Each peripheral, that wishes 
> > to use DMA, provides its slave ID to the DMAC driver, by which it checks, 
> > whether this peripheral is supported and, if so, finds its configuration, 
> > picks up the next free channel and configures it.
> > 
> > So, with the above in mind, IIUC, the above DT binding proposal would 
> > require us to reference all 3 generic DMAC instances in each slave dmas 
> > property? 
> 
> You could if you wanted to have the ability to select 1 out of the 3.
> However, I would not say it is a hard requirement. You could just
> provide one. Or you could list all 3, but use some form of match
> variable to indicate a default DMAC for a given peripheral.

Right. From the description above, it seems that shmobile is actually
simpler than some of the others because the slave ID is always the
same for each of the controllers.

In the common case, you could have one device connected to the third
slave ID of the first controller but the fifth slave ID of the
second controller. In this case, you really have to specify each
controller with its slave ID separately, even if that means a lot
of duplicate data for shmobile.

I'm not sure I understand what the "configuration register values"
above are. Most likely, those should all be part of the slave ID,
which would then span multiple 32-bit values in the "dmas" property.

Conveniently, that also takes care of removing the DMAC platform data.

	Arnd