Simon Krix has reported another instance of what seems to be this
problem, over on libieee1284-list. The archive is at
sourceforge.net/projects/libieee1284, 'Subject: The Next Bug.'.
Here's the description:
"The next problem I had was sending packets of data to the scanner
with a DMA-enabled parport_pc.o (as before, using libieee1284's
ppdev interface). It seemed to send corrupt data. Instead of 0xec 20
00 00 00 00 00 00 I was seeing something that looked a lot like 0x20
00 00 00 00 00 00 ec. This might have been an off-by-one error when
stepping though the buffer, as the byte after the end of the buffer
is likely to also be ec - but I didn't find the problem. I solved it
by loading parport_pc.o without a DMA channel (I'll have to verify
that the DMA channel is still right, I can't trust my motherboard to
leave it alone). I also had this error in the kernel log (not a
debug kernel):
parport0: BUSY timeout (-4) in compat_write_block_pio"
The BUSY timeout business might or might not be related; it happens
after the actual data transfer I think.
Tim.
*/
On Tue, Sep 11, 2001 at 05:49:57PM -0400, Dave Strauss wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Sep 2001 22:37:32 +0100, Philip Blundell <philb@gnu.org> wrote:
> >
> > >I think at least for now I think I'm just going to turn DMA off. I'm
> > >still open to trying other experiments, though, if anybody wants to
> > >suggest something.
> >
> > I guess it would be instructive to know how the corruptions
> > correspond to invocations of parport_pc_fifo_write_block_dma. If
> > you feel like hacking that function around a bit, how about adding
> > a flag that gets set when the "DMA write timed out" condition
> > happens; if the flag is set on entry to the function, dump out the
> > first few bytes in `buf' to the console and clear the flag again.
> >
> > I'm slightly suspicious that there might be a hardware flaw in
> > either your DMA controller or your parallel port. If you have
> > another computer with a different chipset available, it would be
> > interesting to know whether you can make the same thing happen.
> >
> > p.
> >
>
> I'm also slightly suspicious of the hardware, but unfortunately
> I've only got the one machine that has DMA and is running a 2.4.x
> kernel. The only other 2.4.x machine I have access to at the
> moment doesn't have DMA.
>
> I'll try the buf dump when I get a chance.
>
> -- Dave Strauss
>
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Nov 19 2001 - 09:00:43 EST