[PATCH v2 1/2] mailbox: add async request mechanism to empower controllers w/ hw queues

[Jassi Brar]

Hi Tudor,

On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 8:27 AM Tudor Ambarus <tudor.ambarus at linaro.org> wrote:
>
> Hi, Jassi,
>
> On 10/21/24 5:32 PM, Jassi Brar wrote:
> >> On 10/18/24 8:49 AM, Tudor Ambarus wrote:
> >
> >> The active request is considered completed when TX completes. But it seems
> >> that TX is not in direct relation with RX,
> >
> > TX and RX are assumed independent operations (which they are).
> > TX is sending a message/request to the remote successfully. 'Success'
> > can be indicated by any of the three methods  TXDONE_BY_{POLLING, IRQ,
> > ACK}.
> > You seem to assume it should always be an ACK where we receive an
> > acknowledgment/response packet, which is not the case.
>
> My controller driver indeed ties TX to RX and considers the request
> completed when the RX completes.
>
Does your controller require RX or the protocol? I suspect the latter.
Anyway, the former is also supported by TXDONE_BY_ACK already.

> >
> >> Is there a specific driver that I can look at in order to understand the
> >> case where RX is not tied to TX?
> >
> >  Many...
> >  * The remote end owns sensors and can asynchronously send, say
> > thermal, notifications to Linux.
> >  * On some platform the RX may be asynchronous, that is sent later
> > with some identifying tag of the past TX.
> >  * Just reverse the roles of local and remote - remote sends us a
> > request (RX for us) and we are supposed to send a response (TX).
>
> I was hoping for a name of a driver, but I guess I can find them out
> eventually.
>
Do these usecases seem impossible to you? Many users are not upstream
that we care
about as long as we are not making some corrective change.


> >
> >> Also, if you think there's a better way to enable controllers to manage
> >> their hardware queues, please say.
> >>
> > Tying RX to TX has nothing to do with hardware queues. There can be a
>
> Right, I agree.
>
> > hardware queue and the protocol can still be
> > "local-to-remote-broadcast".
> >
> > While I don't think we need the "Rx is in relation to some past Tx"
> > api, I am open to ideas to better utilize h/w queues.
> >
> > The h/w TX queue/fifo may hold, say, 8 messages while the controller
> > transmits them to the remote. Currently it is implemented by
> > .last_tx_done() returning true as long as fifo is not full.
> > The other option, to have more than one TX in-flight, only complicates
> > the mailbox api without fetching any real benefits because the
> > protocol would still need to handle cases like Tx was successful but
> > the remote rejected the request or the Rx failed on the h/w fifo
> > (there could be rx-fifo too, right). Is where I am at right now.
> >
> No worries, I'm confident we'll reach a conclusion.
>
> It's true I implemented just my use case, but that doesn't mean that the
> "request" approach can't be extended for current users.
>
Sorry, I am not sure we should make the api dance around your usecase.
If your usecase is not currently handled, please let me know. We can
discuss that.

Thanks.