linux-kernel - Re: PROBLEM: USB keyboards works only 4 per PC host port

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Date:	Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:12:17 -0700 (PDT)
From:	David Brownell <david-b@...bell.net>
To:	Alan Stern <stern@...land.harvard.edu>, juanslayton@...extreme.com
Cc:	Aivils Stoss <aivils@...net.lv>, jkosina@...e.cz,
	lud <linux-usb@...r.kernel.org>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@...otime.net>,
	linuxconsole-dev@...ts.sourceforge.net, linux-input@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: PROBLEM: USB keyboards works only 4 per PC host port


--- Alan Stern <stern@...land.harvard.edu> wrote:

> On Tue, 19 Aug 2008 juanslayton@...extreme.com wrote:
> > If I understand your analysis, Aivils' problem is because the UHCI
> > controllers are too slow.
> 
> Not just that; it also is a question of scheduling.  The uhci-hcd
> driver isn't very clever about scheduling, and it tries to put all the
> packets into the same frame.  If the packets were distributed among
> multiple frames then the limit would be considerably higher (eight
> times higher in this case).
> 
> I'm not sure of the scheduling details in the ohci-hcd driver; they
> might well be more flexible than in uhci-hcd.  In which case a single
> OHCI controller would be able to handle up to 32 of these keyboards, 
> even though it is no faster than a UHCI controller.

The OHCI scheduling is pretty simple and compact.  I'd think it would
be easy enough to make UHCI do the same sort of thing:  track bandwidth
assigned to 2^N frames (OHCI hardware imposes a smaller limit for N
than UHCI hardware does), and pick the least loaded of those frames to
use for new transfers.  In ohci-q.c see balance(), periodic_{,un}link().

Thing is that would involve changing how UHCI manages periodic transfers;
assuming it hasn't changed those structures since last I looked.

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