[PATCH v2 0/6] spi-mem: Allow specifying the byte order in DTR mode

[Vignesh Raghavendra]

On 17/03/22 3:44 pm, David Laight wrote:
> From: Michael Walle
>> Sent: 17 March 2022 09:40
>>
>> Am 2022-03-16 14:55, schrieb David Laight:
>>> Thought...
>>
>> Thank you for your proposal.
>>
>>> Can you read the device in STR mode until you get a suitable
>>> non-palindromic value, then read it in DTR mode and dynamically
>>> determine the byte order?
>>>
>>> Clearly this won't work if the device is erased to all 0xff.
>>> But a check could be done on/after the first write.
>>>
>>> I suspect write times are actually dominated by the time spent
>>> waiting for the write to complete?
>>> (Never mind the earlier block erase time.)
>>> So always writing in STR mode probably makes little difference?
>>> Writes really ought to be uncommon as well.
>>>
>>> Speeding up reads is a different matter - and probably useful.
>>>
>>> Of course, if you've got hardware reading the spi memory in DTR
>>> mode for config data you might need to byteswap it (compared
>>> to the STR writes) - but that is probably a 2nd order problem.
>>>
>>> I've got some bespoke logic on an PCIe fpga for accessing spi memory.
>>> Uses address bits for the control signals and converts a 32bit
>>> read/write into 8 nibble transfers to the chip.
>>> (uses byte enables - don't an odd number of clocks.)
>>> mmapp()ed to userspace for updating the 6MB fpga image.
>>
>> Our problem is not how to detect that we have to swap it, but
>> rather what we do when we have to do it.
>>
>> If we have a controller which can swap the bytes for us on the
>> fly, we are lucky and can enable swapping if we need it. We are
>> also lucky when we don't have to swap the flash contents, obviously.
>>
>> But what do we do when we need to swap it and the controller
>> doesn't support it. We could do it in software which will slow
>> things down. So depending on the use case this might or might not
>> work. We can degrade it to a speed which doesn't have this issue;
>> which might be 1-1-1 in the worst case. We could also do just
>> nothing special; but this will lead to inconsistencies between
>> reading in 1-1-1 and 8d-8d-8d.
> 
> I really doubt you'll notice the effects of a software byteswap
> compared to the actual time taken to do an spi read.
> 
> What's the maximum clock rate for spi memory?
> Something like 50MHz ?

We have Octal SPI flashes running at upwards of 200MHz clock (400MB/s)
so SW byteswap will add significant overhead.


> If the spi controller isn't doing dma then the cpu pio reads
> to get the data are very likely to be even slower than that.
> (Especially if they are PCIe reads.)
> 

Modern OSPI/QSPI flash controllers provide MMIO interface to read from
flash where DMA can pull data as if though you are reading from On chip RAM

Regards
Vignesh