Slave McSPI with DMA

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1

Hi Matthijs,

I have been reading your posts and I am impressed with your detailed knowledge of the inner workings of the AM335x. Do you have any experience with using MCSPI as a slave and using EDMA. I’m using a high speed ADC that works as a SPI master (generates sclk). Since LInux has no support for SPI slave mode, my plan was create a driver that sets up MCSPI in slave mode and use EDMA to store measurements to a ping-pong buffer.

Regards,
John

2

I don't have any experience with it yet, but it sounds like it should work.
McSPI even has an option to relocate the fifo port to a 32-byte aligned
address which is specifically added to allow you to use EDMA's "FIFO mode"
(aka "constant addressing" or "streaming burst"), which enables it to slurp
16 or 32 bytes from the McSPI fifo with a single read.

I'm not sure about the "ping-pong buffer" though, I'm not really familiar
with linux kernel programming but I think for incoming DMA it might be
better to allocate cache-cold pages? hmm, not sure how the reduced cache
activity would balance against the increase in bookkeeping... depends also
on what you intend to do with the received data, e.g. if you're going to
stuff it down a pipe towards userspace you probably want to hand over the
pages and need to allocate new ones anyway.

Beware BTW that if SPI mode 0 or 2 is used, chip select is *required* to be
deasserted between transfers. No such restriction applies to SPI mode 1 or
3, and chip select is optional there.

Depending on what exactly that adc is sending, there's also a (small)
chance you could interface it to McASP instead, which has a larger fifo and
some data reformatting options.

3

So, I was curious about this too, and decided to do some web searching . . . it seems there is a lot of talk about this going back since around 2009. Although it is unclear whether or not slave mode was ever achieved, some guy on the E2E forums claimed to have done it. Using DMA as well.

But there is this:
http://linux-kernel.2935.n7.nabble.com/PATCH-spi-spi-omap2-mcspi-c-Add-dts-for-slave-device-configuration-td622831.html

And a bunch of other semi code related posts here and there that I can’t make out if they’re useful or not. It’s kind of a wonder that any of these guys ever get anything done . . .

4

I think that link refers to SPI slave nodes and not SPI slave mode. There are a few postings on E2E related to SPI slave mode, but none seem to have achieve anything, or at least anything that they disclosed.

My approach is to use Starterware to mock up a solution where I have McSPI and EDMA transferring data to a ping-pong buffer (DMA writes to one buffer while CPU processes the other buffer and then swap buffers at the end of each transfer). If I can achieve that then I should be able to implement the same solution in a device driver.

Regards,
John

5

I think that link refers to SPI slave nodes and not SPI slave mode.

Yeah it’s not always clear what these people are talking about. For instance, peopel talking about using SPI Master mode using the inccorect acronyms (SIMO, SOMI ) etc.

Master device → MISO, MOSI

Slave device → SIMO, SOMI

Is how I understand it’s supposed to be . . . anyway, good luck, and I’ll keep an eye out for anything useful.

6

Thanks William.

Regards,
John

7

Did you have any luck with the EDMA and slave mode in Starterware?
I’ve created a standard slave driver for starterware with success, but I’m having trouble getting the EDMA portion to work. Any tips you’d care to share?