FEC ethernet issues [Was: PL310 errata workarounds]

[Russell King - ARM Linux]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 12:11:35AM +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 11:44:43PM +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> > Now, you mention packet loss above.  Even on half-duplex networks, I
> > would not expect there to be much packet loss because of the
> > retransmissions after a collision, and 100Mbit networks handle this
> > much better than 10Mbit.  It takes repeated collisions to cause a
> > packet to actually be dropped (and a packet being dropped because
> > of collisions should be logged by the transmitting host in its
> > interface statistics.)
> > 
> > Another possibility is that the FEC isn't properly negotiating with
> > the hub, and the two ends are ending up configured differently, or
> > that it is negotiating properly but the FEC isn't being configured
> > correctly.
> > 
> > Now that we know a little more about your setup, including that it
> > seems to be one specific setup which is causing the problems, I'll
> > do some more testing - I have an old Allied Telesys 10/100 hub here
> > which I'll try putting the iMX6 on and re-run your tests.
> 
> PC --- 100Mbit hub --- iMX6S
> 
> iperf (2.0.5) -c PC -r reports:
> 
> iMX6 Tx: [  5]  0.0-10.0 sec  85.5 MBytes  71.5 Mbits/sec
> iMX6 Rx: [  3]  0.0-10.0 sec   103 MBytes  86.2 Mbits/sec
> 
> However, there's a marked difference when the iMX6 sends - the
> collision LED is almost permanently on at full brightness, whereas
> when the PC is sending, it's almost always off.
> 
> I'm seeing lots of late collisions and CRC errors in the statistics
> registers.
> 
> It looks to me like the iMX6's transmitter is blathering at any moment,
> not taking any notice whether there's already a carrier on the RX side.
> I'm not yet sure what to make of this yet.

Last night, I performed a different test:

PC --- Gigabit switch --- 10/100Mbit hub --- 10Mbit hub --- iMX6S
           |
  (the rest of my network)

This shows that all the (late) collisions occur in the 10Mbit domain,
and very few in the 100Mbit domain, which puts the blame fairly
squarely on the iMX6 side.

I can see nothing wrong with the setup of the iMX6, nor of the AR8035
phy which my board has.  Both the phy and the FEC appear to correctly
indicate that they are configured for half-duplex with flow control
disabled, and I've been through the iomux settings for the RGMII
interface.

So, I'm left with three possibilities:
- the AR8035 doesn't work with half-duplex
- there is something wrong with the signalling for carrier sense between
  the AR8035 and the FEC.
- the iMX6 FEC doesn't work with half-duplex

It's not easy to monitor the TX_CTL and RX_CTL signals and make sense of
them, so I can't really say what's at fault at the moment, but from what
I can see, my hardware fails to work correctly with half-duplex
connections.

-- 
FTTC broadband for 0.8mile line: now at 9.7Mbps down 460kbps up... slowly
improving, and getting towards what was expected from it.