[linux-sunxi] GSoC 2014 #0 status report - Improving Allwinner SoC support

[jonsmirl at gmail.com]

On Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 11:41 PM, Emilio López <emilio at elopez.com.ar> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> As some of you may know, I'm currently participating in Google Summer of
> Code under the Linux Foundation, working on a proposal titled "Improve
> Allwinner SoCs support on mainline Linux". There is a great quantity of
> devices out there that are powered by Allwinner processors, including but
> not limited to the various Cubieboards, OLinuXinos, STBs, Tablets and “Mini
> PCs”. However, to date, support on mainline Linux is not yet feature
> complete. My proposal on particular focuses on DMA and analog audio on the
> earlier SoCs, and improved A23 support.
>
> The idea here is to make a weekly status report of the project. As we are
> starting mid-program, this one will be a bit different and I'll outline what
> has been worked on so far since the beginning.
>
> To date, I have been mainly working on the DMA driver for sun4i, sun5i and
> sun7i. Despite having completely different drivers on SDK kernels, the
> hardware block looks and behaves the same, so we are using a single driver
> for these three SoC families. I have sent a series of patches[1] as well as
> a follow-up v2[2], and I will keep iterating over it until it's accepted. I
> have also sent two trivial patches[3][4] as a side-effect.
>
> The main challenges while writing this driver can be summarized as a lack of
> documentation. First of all, it took me a bit to get to know DMAEngine. As
> there is not much documentation on it, most of my learning took place by
> reading pre-existing drivers and consulting with my mentor. Secondly, as the
> Allwinner documentation is mostly a register list with bitfield details, I
> also had to read the SDK drivers and do some trial and error testing to
> discover magic values and understand others.
>
> Lately, I have also been working on the audio part, now that I have a
> working DMA driver. After implementing cyclic DMA transfers and some clock
> code, and armed with a Buildroot image with mpg123 and an OpenBSD release
> track[5] in mp3 format, I've been trying to get some sound out of my
> Cubietruck's headphone jack, but without much success so far. I have
> verified my userspace stack and hardware by running these same binaries on
> top of the linux-sunxi 3.4 kernel, and it worked fine. I have since then
> been dumping relevant registers with devmem and comparing them, resolving
> issues as I see them - hopefully this will yield some audible results.
>

Check out the last commit in this branch. It is based on your current
DMA branch.
https://github.com/jonsmirl/lpc31xx/tree/linus

I am getting noise out of the codec but it is not the right noise.
Plus the cyclic transfer falls over when the buffer wraps. There is no
need to use the CONT bit on the Allwinner DMA hardware to implement
cyclic.

The DMA interrupt routine should directly program in the next transfer
in the promise chain when the previous one completes. Doing it from
the tasklet opens a window where kernel task swap delays can cause DMA
underrun.




> Interestingly enough, Allwinner themselves do not seem to be using cyclic
> DMA transfers on their driver[6]. I hope this is not a sign of a hardware
> bug that's not documented.
>
> To give some closure to this status report, I'd like to thank Maxime for his
> mentoring so far, Ezequiel for letting me pick his brain, and the Linux
> Foundation and Google for giving me this opportunity, as well as everyone on
> the kernel and sunxi communities who have come forward to review and test
> patches. You can expect a new report soon, in about a week's time or less.
>
> Emilio
>
> [1] http://www.spinics.net/lists/dmaengine/msg01148.html
> [2] http://www.spinics.net/lists/arm-kernel/msg344766.html
> [3] https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/5/11/166
> [4] https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/7/1/486
> [5] http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html, maybe I should consider using some
> other song for better luck
> [6]
> https://github.com/linux-sunxi/linux-sunxi/blob/sunxi-3.4/sound/soc/sunxi/sunxi-codec.c#L1137
>
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-- 
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl at gmail.com