Re: bus_dmamap_sync() for USB

[Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 08:49:41AM -0400, Michael Lorenz wrote:
> [...]
> >The way USB controllers (all of uhci, ohci and ehci) works makes it  
> >much more
> >sensitive to race conditions: there are linked lists of DMA  
> >descriptors,
> >which is managed by both the host and the contrller (both can add or
> >remove elements from the lists). If both the host and the  
> >controller don't
> >write list pointers to main memory, or read list pointers from main  
> >memory,
> >in a very specific order, the list can become corrupted. I wouldn't be
> >surprised if there were some silicon bugs in this area, which would  
> >show up
> >only in some timing conditions. What makes things worse, and  
> >different from
> >an ethernet or disk controllers, is that the USB controller scan
> >the descriptor lists every microsecond, even if there's nothing to do.
> >ethernet (at last the ex) or disk controllers will do DMA only when  
> >they know
> >they have work to do.
> 
> This sounds like a good explanation of what I'm seeing.
> I'll try your latest patch later today - you said you fixed another  
> race condition(s).
> This leaves the question why the ohci/ehci board just works in much  
> faster machines ( namely an 800MHz G4 and a dual 450MHz US-II ) - I'd  
> expect them to be more sensitive to race conditions like that. On the  
> other hand, they might just be fast enough for the CPU to (almost)  
> always win the race.

This is one explaination. Interrupt latency may also play a role; I had
much more troubles under Xen than with native amd64. 
AFAIK, NetBSD/sparc64 uses the full-ordered memory model for kernel mapping,
so no read/write reordering should happens here (this is what I've been
told when I asked about memory barrier on sparc64). I don't know about the G4.

> 
> have fun
> Michael
> 
> PS: something completely different - does crmfb work properly on your  
> R10k O2? And did you ever try my accelerated X hack?

I've used it though serial console for the USB tests. I can try the
VGA display this evening.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           
Manuel.Bouyer%lip6.fr@localhost
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--