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Message-ID: <1393652927.45628.YahooMailNeo@web164006.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 21:48:47 -0800 (PST)
From: Chase Southwood <chase.southwood@...oo.com>
To: Ian Abbott <abbotti@....co.uk>,
"gregkh@...uxfoundation.org" <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>
Cc: Ian Abbott <ian.abbott@....co.uk>,
"hsweeten@...ionengravers.com" <hsweeten@...ionengravers.com>,
"devel@...verdev.osuosl.org" <devel@...verdev.osuosl.org>,
"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Staging: comedi: add timeouts to while loops in s626.c
>On Friday, February 28, 2014 11:26 AM, Ian Abbott <abbotti@....co.uk> wrote:
>>On 2014-02-28 07:35, Chase Southwood wrote:
>> Smatch located a handful of while loops testing readl calls in s626.c.
>> Since these while loops depend on readl succeeding, it's safer to make
>> sure they time out eventually.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Chase Southwood <chase.southwood@...oo.com>
>> ---
>> Ian and/or Hartley, I'd love your comments on this. It seems to me that
>> we want these kinds of while loops properly timed out, but I want to make
>> sure I'm doing everything properly. First off, s626_debi_transfer() says
>> directly that it is called from within critical sections, so I assume
>> that means that the new comedi_timeout() function is no good here, and
>> s626_send_dac() looked equally suspicious, so I opted for iterative
>> timeouts. Is this correct? Also, for these timeouts, I used a very
>> conservative 10000 iterations, would it be better to decrease that?
>
>Well 10000 iterations is an improvement on infinity! If the hardware is
>working, you'd expect it to go round a lot fewer iterations than that,
>but if the hardware is broken all bets are off, especially if it is
>generating interrupts.
>
Great, thanks! I suppose I'll leave that number there then.
>
>> Also, do my error strings appear acceptable?
>
>Mostly. There's a type in one of the strings that says "TLS" instead of
>"TSL".
>
*Sigh* I promise I can type sometimes :P I'll get this corrected.
>
>> And finally, are timeouts here even necessary or helpful, or are there
>> any better ways to do it?
>
>In the case of s626_send_dac(), it doesn't seem to be used in any
>critical sections, so it could make use of Hartley's comedi_timeout().
>
>Some of the timeout errors could be propagated, especially for
>s626_send_dac() which is only reachable from very few paths.
>
Awesome, I'll swap all of my timeouts out for comedi_timeout() in s626_send_dac().
As for propagating the timeout errors, could you please clarify that a bit further? Both of the functions
which I add timeouts inside of in this patch return void, and so in their current state they cannot return any error
values. Would you like them (or at least s626_send_dac()) to instead return an error upon timeout/or success on success,
or am I just totally misunderstanding your meaning of propagate here?
>
>There are other infinite loops involving calls to the s626_mc_test()
>function, but those could be dealt with by other patches.
>
Yeah, I saw those...I'll whip up a patch for them, just wanted to verify that everything looks pretty good here
before I started on that. I'll have that right out!
Thanks,
Chase
>
>--
>-=( Ian Abbott @ MEV Ltd. E-mail: <abbotti@....co.uk> )=-
>-=( Tel: +44 (0)161 477 1898 FAX: +44 (0)161 718 3587 )=-
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