iio:trigger: Experimental kthread tight loop trigger (thread only)

This patch is in response to that of
Gregor Boirie <gregor.boirie@parrot.com>
who proposed using a tight kthread within a device driver (be it with the
support factored out into a helper library) in order to basically spin as
fast as possible.

It is meant as a talking point rather than a formal proposal of the code
(though we are heading towards that I think).
Also gives people some working code to mess around with.

I proposed that this could be done with a trigger with a few constraints
and this is the proof (be it ugly) of that.

There are some constraints though, some of which we would want to relax
if this were to move forward.

* Will only run the thread part of the registered pollfunc.  This is to
  avoid the overhead of jumping in and out of interrupt context.  Is the
  overhead significant?  Not certain but feels like it should be!

* This limitation precludes any device that 'must' do some work in
  interrupt context.  However, that is true of few if any drivers and
  I suspect that any that do will be restricted to using triggers they
  provide themselves.  Usually we have a top half mainly to grab a
  timestamp as soon after the dataready type signal as possible.

Signed-off-by: Jonathan Cameron <jic23@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Daniel Baluta <daniel.baluta@intel.com>

1 files changed, 12 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/drivers/iio/trigger/Kconfig b/drivers/iio/trigger/Kconfig
index 519e6772f6f5..809b2e7d58fa 100644
--- a/drivers/iio/trigger/Kconfig
+++ b/drivers/iio/trigger/Kconfig
@@ -24,6 +24,18 @@ config IIO_INTERRUPT_TRIGGER
 	  To compile this driver as a module, choose M here: the
 	  module will be called iio-trig-interrupt.
 
+config IIO_TIGHTLOOP_TRIGGER
+	tristate "A kthread based hammering loop trigger"
+	depends on IIO_SW_TRIGGER
+	help
+	  An experimental trigger, used to allow sensors to be sampled as fast
+	  as possible under the limitations of whatever else is going on.
+	  Uses a tight loop in a kthread.  Will only work with lower half only
+	  trigger consumers.
+
+	  To compile this driver as a module, choose M here: the
+	  module will be called iio-trig-loop.
+
 config IIO_SYSFS_TRIGGER
 	tristate "SYSFS trigger"
 	depends on SYSFS