Re: [PATCH 00/71] More fixes, cleanup and modernization for NCR5380 drivers

Ondrej Zary
2015-11-24T21:40:24Z

On Tuesday 24 November 2015 10:13:17 Finn Thain wrote:
>
> On Tue, 24 Nov 2015, Ondrej Zary wrote:
>
> > On Tuesday 24 November 2015, Finn Thain wrote:
> > >
> > > On Mon, 23 Nov 2015, Ondrej Zary wrote:
> > >
> > > >
> > > > PDMA seems to be broken in multiple ways. NCR5380_pread cannot
> > > > process less than 128 bytes. In fact, 53C400 datasheet says that
> > > > it's HW limitation: non-modulo-128-byte transfers should use PIO.
> > > >
> > > > Adding
> > > > transfersize = round_down(transfersize, 128);
> > > > to generic_NCR5380_dma_xfer_len() improves the situation a bit.
> > > >
> > > > After modprobe, some small reads (8, 4, 24 and 64 bytes) are done
> > > > using PIO, then eight 512-byte reads using PDMA and then it fails on
> > > > a 254-byte read. First 128 bytes are read using PDMA and the next
> > > > PDMA operation hangs waiting forever for the host buffer to be
> > > > ready.
> > > >
> > >
> > > A 128-byte PDMA receive followed by 126-byte PDMA receive? I don't see
> > > how that is possible given round_down(126, 128) == 0. Was this the
> > > actual 'len' argument to NCR5380_pread() in g_NCR5380.c?
> >
> > No 126-byte PDMA. The 126 bytes were probably lost (or mixed with the
> > next read?).
>
> When you said, the "PDMA operation hangs waiting forever", I figured that
> you had hit an infinite loop in NCR5380_pread()... but now I'm lost.
>
> My main concern here is to confirm that I didn't break anything e.g. with
> patch 24 or 41. It would be nice to know that this hang is not the result
> of a new bug.
>
> > The next read was also 254 bytes so another 128-byte PDMA transfer.
> >
> > Then modified NCR5380_information_transfer() to transfer the remaining
> > data (126 bytes in this case) using PIO. It did not help, the next PDMA
> > transfer failed too.
> >
>
> AFAICT, no change to NCR5380_information_transfer() should be needed. It
> was always meant to cope with the need to split a transfer between (P)DMA
> and PIO.

Instead of fixing split transfers, simply forced everything non-modulo-128 to
PIO:
--- a/drivers/scsi/g_NCR5380.c
+++ b/drivers/scsi/g_NCR5380.c
@@ -703,6 +703,10 @@ static int generic_NCR5380_dma_xfer_len(struct scsi_cmnd *cmd)
!(cmd->SCp.this_residual % transfersize))
transfersize = 32 * 1024;

+ /* 53C400 datasheet: non-modulo-128-byte transfers should use PIO */
+ if (transfersize % 128)
+ transfersize = 0;
+
return transfersize;
}

It seems to work and greatly improves performance:
# hdparm -t --direct /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb:
Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 4 MB in 4.84 seconds = 846.15 kB/sec

--
Ondrej Zary