Spurious timeouts in mvmdio
Nicolas Schichan
nschichan at freebox.fr
Mon Dec 2 10:15:54 EST 2013
Hi,
During 3.13-rc1 testing, I have found out that the mvmdio driver would report
timeouts on the kernel console:
[ 11.011334] orion-mdio orion-mdio: Timeout: SMI busy for too long
The hardware is a MV88F6281 Kirkwood CPU. The mvmdio driver is using the irq
line 46 (ge00_err).
I am inclined to believe that it is due to the fact that wait_event_timeout()
is called with a timeout parameter of 1 jiffy in orion_mdio_wait_ready(). If
the timer interrupt ticks right after calling wait_event_timeout(), we may end
up spending much less time than MVMDIO_SMI_TIMEOUT (1 msec) in
wait_event_timeout(), and as a result report a timeout as the MDIO access did
not complete in such a short time.
As to how to fix this, I see two options (I don't know which one would be
prefered):
- Option 1: always pass a timeout of at least 2 jiffy to wait_event_timeout().
- Option 2: switch to wait_event_hrtimeout().
I can provide patches for both options.
Regards,
--
Nicolas Schichan
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