• Alexandru Stan's avatar
    backlight: pwm_bl: Fix interpolation · 789eb04b
    Alexandru Stan authored
    The previous behavior was a little unexpected, its properties/problems:
    1. It was designed to generate strictly increasing values (no repeats)
    2. It had quantization errors when calculating step size. Resulting in
    unexpected jumps near the end of some segments.
    
    Example settings:
    	brightness-levels = <0 1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256>;
    	num-interpolated-steps = <16>;
    
    Whenever num-interpolated-steps was larger than the distance
    between 2 consecutive brightness levels the table would get really
    discontinuous. The slope of the interpolation would stick with
    integers only and if it was 0 the whole line segment would get skipped.
    
    The distances between 1 2 4 and 8 would be 1 (property #1 fighting us),
    and only starting with 16 it would start to interpolate properly.
    
    Property #1 is not enough. The goal here is more than just monotonically
    increasing. We should still care about the shape of the curve. Repeated
    points might be desired if we're in the part of the curve where we want
    to go slow (aka slope near 0).
    
    Problem #2 is plainly a bug. Imagine if the 64 entry was 63 instead,
    the calculated slope on the 32-63 segment will be almost half as it
    should be.
    
    The most expected and simplest algorithm for interpolation is linear
    interpolation, which would handle both problems.
    Let's just implement that!
    
    Take pairs of points from the brightness-levels array and linearly
    interpolate between them. On the X axis (what userspace sees) we'll
    now have equally sized intervals (num-interpolated-steps sized,
    as opposed to before where we were at the mercy of quantization).
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAlexandru Stan <amstan@chromium.org>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarDaniel Thompson <daniel.thompson@linaro.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLee Jones <lee.jones@linaro.org>
    789eb04b
pwm_bl.c 17.7 KB