Re: Waiting for a bit in a register to be cleared: which strategy?

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>> Efficient in terms of what resource?  That is, what measure of
>> efficiency are you interested in here?
> Above all, the code complexity (not the hardware resource
> consumption).

Then, yes, just loop.  First make it work, then make it better.

>> The simplest is probably to just put a limit on the iteration count:
>> [...] 
>> But this makes the timeout inherently dependent on the host CPU speed.
> Yes, I excluded this because I would like to avoid using the CPU for
> (potentially) millions of cycles and - as you said - because of the
> CPU-dependent variable increment.
>> If that's a problem, you could add a delay in the loop
> I think this is the best in my case.

Well, be aware that DELAY() on many machines, especially for small
arguments, _is_ just a cycle-burning loop - it just multiplies the
argument by a constant calculated based on CPU speed.

> Interrupts are maybe the ideal solution, but I'm completely unable to
> handle them in a driver.  I'm a complete newbie.

>> The last two options have the advantage that they release the CPU to
>> do other useful work while waiting.  They have the disadvantage that
>> they decrease responsiveness [...].
> Yes, of coure.

If that's "of course" to you, you're not a _complete_ newbie. :-)

I'd say, just use the simple loop.  Once you have that much working,
*then* worry about things like handling (pseudo-)hardware failures or
interrupts, or sleeping instead of busy-waiting.

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