From: Linuxppc-dev Guenter Roeck

Sent: 11 March 2021 21:35

On 3/11/21 1:17 PM, Chris Packham wrote:

quoted

On 11/03/21 9:18 pm, Wolfram Sang wrote:

quoted

quoted

Bummer. What is really weird is that you see clock stretching under
CPU load. Normally clock stretching is triggered by the device, not
by the host.

One example: Some hosts need an interrupt per byte to know if they
should send ACK or NACK. If that interrupt is delayed, they stretch the
clock.

It feels like something like that is happening. Looking at the T2080
Reference manual there is an interesting timing diagram (Figure 14-2 if
someone feels like looking it up). It shows SCL low between the ACK for
the address and the data byte. I think if we're delayed in sending the
next byte we could violate Ttimeout or Tlow:mext from the SMBUS spec.

I think that really leaves you only two options that I can see:
Rework the driver to handle critical actions (such as setting TXAK,
and everything else that might result in clock stretching) in the
interrupt handler, or rework the driver to handle everything in
a high priority kernel thread.

I'm not sure a high priority kernel thread will help.
Without CONFIG_PREEMPT (which has its own set of nasties)
a RT process won't be scheduled until the processor it last
ran on does a reschedule.
I don't think a kernel thread will be any different from a
user process running under the RT scheduler.

I'm trying to remember the smbus spec (without remembering the I2C one).
While basically a clock+data bit-bang the slave is allowed to drive
the clock low to extend a cycle.
It may be allowed to do this at any point?
The master can generate the data at almost any rate (below the maximum)
but I don't think it can go down to zero.
But I do remember one of the specs having a timeout.

But I'd have thought the slave should answer the cycle correctly
regardless of any 'random' delays the master adds in.
Unless you are getting away with de-asserting chipselect?

The only implementation I've done is one an FPGA so doesn't have
worry about interrupt latencies.
It doesn't actually support clock stretching; it wasn't in the
code I started from and none of the slaves we need to connect to
ever does it.

	David

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