[PATCH v7 01/10] ARM: davinci: move private EDMA API to arm/common

[Russell King - ARM Linux]

On Tue, Feb 05, 2013 at 04:30:45PM +0100, Linus Walleij wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 10:54 PM, Cyril Chemparathy <cyril at ti.com> wrote:
> > On 02/04/2013 04:11 PM, Linus Walleij wrote:
> 
> >> Cyril, just stack up the cookies and take a sweep over them to see
> >> which ones are baked when the NAPI poll comes in -> problem
> >> solved.
> >
> > You're assuming that cookies complete in order.  That is not necessarily
> > true.
> 
> So put them on a wait list? Surely you will have a list of pending
> cookies and pick from the front of the queue if there isn't a hole on
> queue position 0.

Not quite.  The key is the cookie system DMA engine employs to indicate
when a cookie is complete.

Cookies between the "issued sequence" and "completed sequence" are defined
to be in progress, everything else is defined to be completed.

This means that if "completed sequence" is 1, and "issued sequence" is 5,
then cookies with values 2, 3, 4, 5 are in progress.  You can't mark
sequence 4 as being complete until 2 and 3 have completed.

If we need out-of-order completion, then that's a problem for the DMA
engine API, because you'd need to radically change the way "completion"
is marked.