LINUX INDUSTRIAL I/O SUBSYSTEM

LINUX INDUSTRIAL I/O SUBSYSTEM

http://wiki.analog.com/software/linux/docs/iio/iio

IIO OVERVIEW

• The Industrial I/O subsystem is intended to provide support for devices that in some sense are analog to digital or digital to analog convertors (ADCs, DACs).
• Devices that fall into this category are:
  • ADCs
  • Accelerometers
  • Gyros
  • IMUs
  • Capacitance to Digital Converters (CDCs)
  • Pressure Sensors
  • Color, Light and Proximity Sensors
  • Temperature Sensors
  • Magnetometers
  • DACs
  • DDS (Direct Digital Synthesis)
  • PLLs (Phase Locked Loops)
  • Variable/Programmable Gain Amplifiers (VGA, PGA)

• The overall aim is to fill the gap between the somewhat similar hwmon and input subsystems.
• Hwmon is very much directed at low sample rate sensors used in applications such as fan speed control and temperature measurement.
• Input is, as it's name suggests focused on human interaction input devices.:
  • Keyboard
  • Mouse
  • Touch Screen
  • Joystick

• In some cases there is considerable overlap between these and IIO.

• A typical device falling into the IIO category would be connected via  SPI or  I2C.
• However typical  DMA operated devices such as ones connected to a high speed synchronous serial (McBSP,  SPORT) or high speed synchronous parallel (EPI,  PPI) or FPGA peripherals are also subject to this subsystem.
• Since latter ones unlike  SPI or  I2C are not generally abstracted by Linux bus drivers they are subject to processor platform dependent implementations.

IIO SUBSYSTEM OVERVIEW

Functionality of IIO

• Basic device registration and handling
• Polled access to device channels via sysfs.
• Event chrdevs
  • These are similar to input in that they provide a route to user space for hardware triggered events. Such events include threshold detectors, free-fall detectors and more complex action detection. The events themselves are currently very simple with merely an event code and a timestamp. Any data associated with the event must be accessed via polling.

A given device may have one or more event channel. These events are turned on or off (if possible) via sysfs interfaces.

• Hardware ring buffer support
• Some recent sensors have included fifo / ring buffers on the sensor chip.
• These greatly reduce the load on the host CPU by buffering relatively large numbers of data samples based on an internal sampling clock.
• Each ring buffer typically has an event chrdev (similar to the more general ones above) to pass on events such as buffer 50% full and an access chrdev via which the raw data it self may be read back.
• Trigger and software ring buffer (kfifo) support

Trigger and software ring buffer support

• In many data analysis applications it is useful to be able to capture data based on some external signal (trigger).
• These triggers might be a
  • data ready signal
  • gpio line connected to some external system
  • on processor periodic interrupt.
  • User space reading a specific file in sysfs.
• A single trigger many initialize data capture or reading from a number of sensors.
• These triggers are used in iio to fill software ring buffers acting in a very similar fashion to the hardware buffers described above.
• Triggers can be completely unrelated to the sensor itself

Standalone trigger drivers

name	description
iio-trig-gpio	Provides support for using GPIO pins as IIO triggers.
iio-trig-rtc	Provides support for using periodic capable real time clocks as IIO triggers.
iio-trig-sysfs	Provides support for using SYSFS entry as IIO triggers.
iio-trig-bfin-timer	Provides support for using a Blackfin timer as IIO triggers.

02 Mar 2011 15:16 ·  Michael Hennerich

Industrial I/O Subsystem In-Kernel Interfaces

The IIO subsystem can act as a layer under other elements of the kernel providing a means of obtaining ADC type readings or of driving DAC type signals. The functionality supported will grow as use cases arise.

IIO Ring Buffer / kfifo

• IIO uses a ring buffer also called circular buffer which is a data structure that uses a single, fixed-size buffer as if it were connected end-to-end.
• This structure is well suited for buffering data streams. These buffers are typically used to solve the producer-consumer problem. In some applications it is desired for the producer ( e.g., an ADC) to overwrite old data if the consumer ( e.g., the User Space Application) is unable to momentarily keep up. But typically the buffer is sized to provide adequate space so that this circumstance should never happen.

POINTERS

• IIO mailing list:  linux [dash] iio [at] vger [dot] kernel [dot] org
• IIO Documentation
• IIO Utils Main Page
• IIO test and visualization demo application
• IIO Command Server
• Pointers and good books

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