Advantages of interrupt driven button driver?

[Vortex]

Hi,

I don't know too much about the technical stuff and I was wondering if the recent changes in the Sansa's button driver to use GPIO IRQs instead of polling affect me as the "end-user" in any way.

It seems the PCM buffer still empties rather quickly when scrolling through lists, so scrolling did not get much smoother compared to before the changes.

However, if Rockbox no longer has to poll for button events does that save some energy (resulting in longer battery life)?

Sorry for the stupid questions, I'm just curious what the developers are working on.

Keep up the good work! Rockbox on the Sansa has improved so much over just the past few weeks, it's awesome!

[cpchan]

Actually the version that you  are using still use polling. The GPIO code is in there, but is not  really used. The Sansa port only started using GPIO IRQ's on Jun. 3, 2007:

r13538 | jethead71 | 2007-06-03 10:31:42 -0400 (Sun, 03 Jun 2007) | 1 line

e200: Finally use GPIO IRQs for the buttons...it's IRQ enable bit 33 afterall an
d verified independently. There shouldn't now be a need to add tick tasks to mon
itor GPIO level status in other code.

Charles