28 Aug 2013 Pizza   » (Master)

cw1200_spi now works properly, and is in backports!

I just submitted two patches to the cw1200_spi driver; hopefully they'll make it into 3.11-final, but if not, they'll go into 3.11.1 instead.

A user (Dave Sizebur) was trying to get this driver working on a Beagleboard xM, only to discover near-immediate BUG() triggers when the driver was loaded. This was due to the the driver attempting to perform a SPI transfer in interrupt context -- ironically, trying to disable the interrupt in the hardware.

Apparently some (most?) SPI controllers use asynchronous calls -- which can sleep, which is a no-no in interrupt context. The hardware I used to develop this driver (an ancient Sagrad Kraken board based on a Samsung s3c2440) used synchronous, non-sleeping calls.

The solution was to disable the interrupt via the linux disable_irq() call instead of masking it on the hardware itself.

The second problem was a hang (not a deadlock) caused by improper locking in the SPI driver's attempt to emulate the semantics of the SDIO layer's claim/release_hardware API. When there was lock contention, nothing actually tried to wake up the lock requestor when the lock was eventually freed. This bug never presented itself on my hardware, more out of dumb luck than anything else.

Several days and a dozen or so e-mail exchanges later, Dave had a working cw1200_spi driver. His patience in this endeavour was apprecited, especially since I didn't have any SPI-capable hardware handy.

The known bug list is back down to zero, just where I like it. But it's the unknown ones that get ya.

Meanwhile, the small pile of patches I've submitted to the linux backports project have been merged, so the next backports release will include support for the cw1200 driver going back to the 2.6.34 (SPI) and 2.6.32 (SDIO) kernels. With a little more effort, support should be possible going back several more releases, providing there's sufficient interest.

Since there are still some out-of-tree patches (unmerged fixes and regulatory-approval-type stuff) for the cw1200 driver, I'm considering releasing my own set of backports tarballs if there is sufficient interest.

"Sufficient interest" basically means it's not going to happen unless someone asks, because I have other projects to keep me busy. :)

Syndicated 2013-08-28 02:27:21 from Solomon Peachy

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!