[PATCH 05/12] phylib: Allow reading and writing a mii bus from atomic context.

[Richard Cochran]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 10:43:08AM -0600, Grant Likely wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 10:08 AM, Richard Cochran
> <richardcochran at gmail.com> wrote:
> > In order to support hardware time stamping from a PHY, it is necessary to
> > read from the PHY while running in_interrupt(). This patch allows a mii
> > bus to operate in an atomic context. An mii_bus driver may declare itself
> > capable for this mode. Drivers which do not do this will remain with the
> > default that bus operations may sleep.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Richard Cochran <richard.cochran at omicron.at>
> 
> Last I checked, the MDIO bus is very slow.  Is this really a good
> idea?  How much latency does MDIO access have on the hardware you are
> working with?

Yes, MDIO access is slow, and it can vary (eg bit banging
implementations). It clear that getting PHY timestamps is costly, but
for applications that want PTP synchronization, one is willing to pay
the price.

> I also don't like the idea of taking a spin lock during MDIO
> operations, and the dual locking mode in the core code.

Originally, the phylib used a spinlock for this. It was replaced with
a mutex in 35b5f6b1a82b5c586e0b24c711dc6ba944e88ef1 in order to
accommodate mdio busses that may need to sleep. So, keeping the option
to use a spinlock is similar to the previous implementation.

> I'd rather see separate atomic context hooks that doesn't obtain the
> mutex under the assumption that the caller has already done so.  If
> the bus doesn't support atomic access, then it won't implement the
> hooks and the core code should return an error.
> 
> I've cc'd Thomas Gleixner.  He might have a better idea about how to
> implement what you're trying to do.

Okay, I'm open to suggestions...

Thanks,

Richard