Re: [PATCHv2] DMAEngine: Let dmac drivers to set chan_id

[Williams, Dan J]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 8:56 PM, Jaswinder Singh
<jaswinder.singh@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 23 July 2011 03:53, Williams, Dan J <dan.j.williams@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>
>> Unless you guaranteed that every id is globally unique I don't see how
>> they are generically usable by common clients?
>>
> Yes. And the first step is to allow DMAC drivers to freely set chan_id value.
> Platform could pass the list and mapping of supported 'global channels'
> via platform_data(?) which the DMAC drivers could set in chan_id
> And I am not sure of defining a new variable for that, because chan_id
> is actually used only by some dmac drivers for internal purpose only -
> which they could do by private variables.

Yes, it does appear to have grown a lot of dubious usage in
drivers/dma/ for something that is described as just a "channel ID for
sysfs".  The intent was for drivers that need to maintain their own
hardware specific identification to define a local id scheme (like
iop-adma does in the iop3xx case).

I can sort of see why it is attractive for the goal of having clients
being able to talk to multiple DMACs since it is a field that all
channels already implement.  But, I don't think we should be mixing
sysfs presentation details with a capability that indicates a certain
compatibility level in a DMAC driver implementation.  If the goal is
to be able to use a single client with multiple drivers that, to me,
is asking for a new capability bit (dma_transaction_type) rather than
an id.  Do you have an example of the client and the DMACs that would
first take advantage of such a cross DMAC compatibility?

> Proposal to have global cross-platform enum of channel-IDs defined by
> client drivers, was to be my next patch.
> Though I think, this patch is valid in it's own light.

This is not the purpose of chan_id.

--
Dan
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