linux/drivers/firewire
Clemens Ladisch 7f51a100bb firewire: ohci: retransmit isochronous transmit packets on cycle loss
In isochronous transmit DMA descriptors, link the skip address pointer
back to the descriptor itself.  When a cycle is lost, the controller
will send the packet in the next cycle, instead of terminating the
entire DMA program.

There are two reasons for this:

* This behaviour is compatible with the old IEEE1394 stack.  Old
  applications would not expect the DMA program to stop in this case.

* Since the OHCI driver does not report any uncompleted packets, the
  context would stop silently; clients would not have any chance to
  detect and handle this error without a watchdog timer.

Signed-off-by: Clemens Ladisch <clemens@ladisch.de>

Pieter Palmers notes:

"The reason I added this retry behavior to the old stack is because some
cards now and then fail to send a packet (e.g. the o2micro card in my
dell laptop).  I couldn't figure out why exactly this happens, my best
guess is that the card cannot fetch the payload data on time.  This
happens much more frequently when sending large packets, which leads me
to suspect that there are some contention issues with the DMA that fills
the transmit FIFO.

In the old stack it was a pretty critical issue as it resulted in a
freeze of the userspace application.

The omission of a packet doesn't necessarily have to be an issue.  E.g.
in IEC61883 streams the DBC field can be used to detect discontinuities
in the stream.  So as long as the other side doesn't bail when no
[packet] is present in a cycle, there is not really a problem.

I'm not convinced though that retrying is the proper solution, but it is
simple and effective for what it had to do.  And I think there are no
reasons not to do it this way.  Userspace can still detect this by
checking the cycle the descriptor was sent in."

Signed-off-by: Stefan Richter <stefanr@s5r6.in-berlin.de> (changelog, comment)
2010-02-14 15:10:41 +01:00
..
core-card.c
core-cdev.c
core-device.c
core-iso.c
core-topology.c
core-transaction.c
core.h
Kconfig
Makefile
net.c
ohci.c firewire: ohci: retransmit isochronous transmit packets on cycle loss 2010-02-14 15:10:41 +01:00
ohci.h
sbp2.c