Regression: at24 eeprom writing

[Peter Rosin]

On 2015-10-13 14:57, Nicolas Ferre wrote:
> Le 13/10/2015 12:38, Peter Rosin a écrit :
>> On 2015-10-12 18:13, Cyrille Pitchen wrote:
>>> Le 12/10/2015 17:13, Peter Rosin a écrit :
>>>> On 2015-10-05 17:09, Peter Rosin wrote:
>>>>> But what trouble does the i2c bus driver see? Admittedly I only
>>>>> have a simple logic level bus viewer, and not a full-blown
>>>>> oscilloscope, so there might be something analogue going on?
>>>>> I don't think so though, those signals looked fine last time we
>>>>> looked (but we obviously didn't have these issues then, and
>>>>> didn't really look that closely). I'll see if I can recheck
>>>>> with a real scope too.
>>>>
>>>> We redid the tests with a real scope, and the signal looks nice
>>>> and square, so it is not that.
>>>>
>>>> Speculating further on the cause of the long ACKs, I think that
>>>> the i2c driver gets confused by an interrupt that marks the
>>>> transfer complete, and thinks it's a NACK interrupt instead. Is that
>>>> plausible?
>>>>
>>>> If the peripheral unit is such that it generates a stop automatically
>>>> on NACKs, then this makes perfect sense. I.e. the TWI sees that the
>>>> transfer is complete, generates an interrupt, and waits for further
>>>> data or a stop command. Meanwhile the driver thinks it's a NACK and
>>>> that a stop condition has already been sent to the bus, and just
>>>> notifies the i2c consumer (the eeprom driver in this case) of the
>>>> failure and frees up the bus for any future user.
>>>>
>>>> This also matches what I see when I turn on some more traffic on the
>>>> bus, that is interleaved with the eeprom traffic. AFAICT, it can be
>>>> any command that gets chewed up by the eeprom if it is sent to the
>>>> i2c driver during the long ACK.
>>>>
>>>> Are you Atmel people making any progress on this data corrupting
>>>> regression? Is there anything else I can do to help?
>>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> Peter
>>>>
>>>
>>> Hi Peter,
>>>
>>> I have sent a patch to Ludovic for a first internal review before publishing to
>>> mainline. The patch should fix your issue since it fixes it on my sama5d36ek
>>> board with an at24 eeprom.
>>>
>>> More details on the reason of this bug would be provided in both the commit
>>> message and comments in the code provided by the reviewed patch but I you want
>>> an early fix just read the Status Register (AT91_TWI_SR) at the beginning of
>>> at91_do_twi_transfer(). This read clears the NACK bit in the Status Register.
>>> Then the following source code can safely enable the NACK interrupt, otherwise
>>> in some cases a pending NACK interrupt would rise immediately after the line:
>>> at91_twi_write(dev, AT91_TWI_IER, AT91_TWI_NACK);
>>> hence breaking the sequence of operations to be done because the interrupt
>>> handler would call complete() too early so wait_for_completion_timeout()
>>> also exits too early.
>>>
>>> So reading the Status Register at the beginning of at91_do_twi_transfer()
>>> should be enough to fix the issue.
>>
>> Yes, I see no more long ACKs after that reading the Status Register there.
>> Great!
>>
>>> Another mistake is in the interrupt handler itself, ie atmel_twi_interrupt():
>>> we should check the TWI_TXRDY status bit before calling
>>> at91_twi_write_next_byte() only if both the TWI_TXCOMP and TWI_NACK status bits
>>> are clear. Otherwise, writing a new byte into the THR tells the I2C controller
>>> to start a new transfer. Then the I2C slave, the at24 eeprom, is likely to
>>> also reply by a second NACK. Hence the NACK bit is already set into the Status
>>> Register on the next call of at91_do_twi_transfer().
>>> This is what I saw on my scope for PIO transfers.
>>
>> I interpret this as a proposed solution for the strange double NACKs?
>>
>> Anyway, I find it unnecessarily hard to grasp exactly what you mean
>> (wasteful policy you are apparently suffering from where it is OK to
>> publish a patch written in English, but apparently a big no-no to
>> send a diff until it passes some internal review???). I interpreted
> 
> I find your remark pretty rude as I'm reading it while just at the desk
> behind me Cyrille and Ludovic are together trying hard to understand and
> fix this issue.
> They are making sure that this fix doesn't interfere with another SoC's
> IP version with any of the PIO/DMA/FIFO transfer types.
> 
> Cyrille just wanted to keep you informed quickly as we were
> progressing... Anyone can tell you that, obviously, there is no stupid
> policy of not releasing patches @ Atmel!
> 
> Anyway, let's keep the good debugging session progressing well with your
> valuable help...

Yeah, right, that didn't come out right. Sorry!

It was just that from over here I was pulling my hair out over this bug,
and then there appeared to have existed a patch that had been stuck in
internal review since some point last week. I realize now that this might
not have been the case and that the solution could have been found just
yesterday, but the impression I got was that it was not a fresh fix and
that made me a bit tired. So, sorry again.

I will now go test the patch instead. Knock wood.

Cheers,
Peter