Re: serial flow control appears broken

From: Robert Hancock
Date: Thu Aug 02 2007 - 12:14:38 EST


Mark Lord wrote:
I don't believe the speed of the machine has much to do with it,
as IDE PIO is always at pretty much the same speed (or slower)
regardless of the CPU speed.

Best case is about .120 usec per 16-bit word, but that doesn't often pan out
in practice. More typical is something closer to 1 usec per 16-bit word.

So, for multcount=16 (very common), best case is 16 * 256 * .120 = 491 usec,
plus extra overhead for reading the IDE status register (another usec or so),
and other stuff. Figure maybe 500usec total per interrupt for multcount=16
in the best case, or 4000usec in the worst case.

At 115200bps, we get a byte every 86 usec or so. Assuming the UART FIFO
is set to interrupt (warn) us at 12/16 full, we have 4*86 = 344 usec to
respond and de-assert RTS. Less than that in practice.

Conclusion: using IDE multisector PIO is not a good idea with high speed
serial transfers happening, since we cannot respond quickly enough.

It might be possible to set the buffer underrun threshold lower in the UART (?).

All that said, I doubt that his system is using IDE PIO in the first place.
Dunno how long IDE DMA interrupts take, but it's probably in the 20-50 usec range.

I think that PIO transfers only have to be done with interrupts disabled on really old, evil controllers (without unmask set). I don't think libata ever disables interrupts during transfers(?)

--
Robert Hancock Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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Home Page: http://www.roberthancock.com/

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