Re: [PATCH 3/3] can: c_can: cache frames to operate as a true FIFO

From: Marc Kleine-Budde
Date: Mon May 10 2021 - 09:02:14 EST


On 10.05.2021 14:25:15, Marc Kleine-Budde wrote:
> On 09.05.2021 14:43:09, Dario Binacchi wrote:
> > As reported by a comment in the c_can_start_xmit() this was not a FIFO.
> > C/D_CAN controller sends out the buffers prioritized so that the lowest
> > buffer number wins.
> >
> > What did c_can_start_xmit() do if it found tx_active = 0x80000000 ? It
> > waited until the only frame of the FIFO was actually transmitted by the
> > controller. Only one message in the FIFO but we had to wait for it to
> > empty completely to ensure that the messages were transmitted in the
> > order in which they were loaded.
> >
> > By storing the frames in the FIFO without requiring its transmission, we
> > will be able to use the full size of the FIFO even in cases such as the
> > one described above. The transmission interrupt will trigger their
> > transmission only when all the messages previously loaded but stored in
> > less priority positions of the buffers have been transmitted.
>
> The algorithm you implemented looks a bit too complicated to me. Let me
> sketch the algorithm that's implemented by several other drivers.
>
> - have a power of two number of TX objects
> - add a number of objects to struct priv (tx_num)
> (or make it a define, if the number of tx objects is compile time fixed)
> - add two "unsigned int" variables to your struct priv,
> one "tx_head", one "tx_tail"
> - the hard_start_xmit() writes to priv->tx_head & (priv->tx_num - 1)
> - increment tx_head
> - stop the tx_queue if there is no space or if the object with the
> lowest prio has been written
> - in TX complete IRQ, handle priv->tx_tail object
> - increment tx_tail
> - wake queue if there is space but don't wake if we wait for the lowest
> prio object to be TX completed.
>
> Special care needs to be taken to implement that lock-less and race
> free. I suggest to look the the mcp251xfd driver.

After converting the driver to the above outlined implementation it
should be more straight forward to add the caching you implemented.

regards,
Marc

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