Research Fast GPIO access

[sgjava]

After working with sysfs and libgpiod as cross platform solutions I was wondering if there was a faster way using /dev/mem or mmio? I know this gets more bare metal and SBC specific, but for some things you may want absolute speed. https://opensource.com/life/16/4/bulldog-gpio-library for instance claims 1 MHz GPIO writes in Java. However it only supports 3 SBCs as you can see from https://github.com/SilverThings/bulldog. Is there a more generic way to do this and not lose performance? Using my generated JNA wrappers for libgpiod I get about 2K writes per second. In Python I think it's about 70K using libgpiod Python bindings. I realize you may not always need 1 MHz GPIO writes, but it would be neat to offer this in a more generic way.

[sgjava]

OK, so no answers  Well as usual I pressed on. My first mistake was using JNA generation (but it was easy), so I researched JNI. Well JNI is very cumbersome to do by hand, so I looked for a JNI code generator and found one call HawtJNI. Of course it wouldn't work with Java 11 which is the Java LTS version, so I created a fork. Use the JDK11 branch if you want to play with it because I don't know if the PR will be accepted. I started wrapping c-periphery since it now supports the new /dev/gpiochip way of accessing the GPIO chips. I ran a performance test (I validated on a scope) and I'm getting ~235 KHz on a v1 Nano Pi Duo! That's over 500K writes per second compared to 2K using JNA and libgpiod. Even python-periphery yields ~37 KHz which is a pure Python version.

 

Any ways exciting news for bit bangers of the world or anyone needing high performance GPIO. Once I have the GPIO code working I'll post on my Github site and announce. Since Bulldog only supports three boards this is good news for Armbian folks with a wider array of supported boards. I still need to test ARMv8 64 bit.

[Tido]

1 hour ago, sgjava said:

That's over 500K writes per second

Where do you see the use case for this almost insane speed. In the industry?

Congrats for the improvement !!

 

[sgjava]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_banging where you write you own protocols in software without the need for I2C, UART, SPI, etc. https://calcium3000.wordpress.com/2016/08/19/i2c-bit-banging-tutorial-part-i Thus with two GPIO pins I can simulate I2C. With the slower speeds, not so much. You can also do square wave 1 bit PCM sound too. I'm going to date myself, but I was doing this on a C64 in the 1980s. https://github.com/sgjava/garage/blob/master/commodore/c64/digisound/src/digisnd.asm Then you only need a simple piezoelectric speaker.

 

There are probably a bunch of other uses, but this should give you an idea. Just the fact that I'm half the speed of Bulldog with many more platforms is a good thing. I was shooting for a generic high performance solution instead of coding directly to the GPIO chip like Bulldog.

[sgjava]

Looks like ARMV8 64 bit is good as well, so I can proceed to finishing up the GPIO wrapper methods.

[Hect]

That's interesting, have you tried this with C or C++ instead of python?, if so, is there any improvement at all? and can you share that library with us?.

 

Thank you.

Regards.

Edited October 29, 2020 by Hect

[sgjava]

This is basically what https://github.com/sgjava/java-periphery uses. You could use C directly or my Java wrapper.