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The traditional approach used in IIO to implement buffered capture requires
the generation of at least one interrupt per sample. In the interrupt
handler the driver reads the sample from the device and copies it to a
software buffer. This approach has a rather large per sample overhead
associated with it. And while it works fine for samplerates in the range of
up to 1000 samples per second it starts to consume a rather large share of
the available CPU processing time once we go beyond that, this is
especially true on an embedded system with limited processing power. The
regular interrupt also causes increased power consumption by not allowing
the hardware into deeper sleep states, which is something that becomes more
and more important on mobile battery powered devices.

And while the recently added watermark support mitigates some of the issues
by allowing the device to generate interrupts at a rate lower than the data
output rate, this still requires a storage ...