Thread (15 messages) 15 messages, 7 authors, 2016-11-24

[BUG] i2c-designware silently fails on long transfers

From: Liviu.Dudau@arm.com (Liviu Dudau)
Date: 2016-11-21 11:21:35
Also in: linux-i2c

On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 10:43:29AM +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 12:29:01PM +0200, Mika Westerberg wrote:
quoted
On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 07:35:42PM +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
quoted
Another mitigation would be to lower the I2C bus frequency on Juno from
400kHz to 100kHz, so that there's 4x longer IRQ latency possible.
However, even that isn't going to be reliable - even going to 100kHz
isn't going to allow the above case to be solved - the interrupt is
delayed by around 2ms, and it takes about 1.4ms to send/receive 16 bytes
at 100kHz.  (9 * 16 / (100*10^3)).

So, I think all hope is lost for i2c-designware on Juno to cope with
reading the EDID from TDA998x reliably.
:-(

I wonder if we can get it work more reliably by using DMA (provided that
there are DMA channels available for I2C in Juno)? That would allow the
hardware to perform longer reads without relying on how fast the
interrupt handler is able to empty the Rx FIFO.
It would need to DMA to the Tx FIFO to keep it filled - it triggers the
stop condition when the Tx FIFO empties.  From what I can see in the
driver, the Tx FIFO not only takes the data but also a "command" to tell
the hardware what to do.

The Rx FIFO would also need DMA to avoid it overflowing due to high
interrupt latency.

I don't know what state DMA is in on the Juno, or even whether it has
DMA - it has a PL330 DMA controller, but I see nothing in the DT files
making use of it.
The only thing we have tested PL330 with was UART and I2S. I'm not sure we
can really use it with I2C given the above hardware configuration issue.

The other thing we have tried in our private branches was to repeat the EDID
transfer a number of times until the checksum was correct. Andrew Jackson
sent a patch a year or so back to have some ridiculously high number of
retries (30) and that has been rightfully shut down in the upstream.

The unfortunate thing is that the monitors and TVs that we use inside ARM
for testing don't seem to trigger this issue on a regular basis. We had one
or two small 7" TVs that did that, and the brute force retry of EDID transfer
sorted them out for the limited use that we had for them.

Best regards,
Liviu
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