[ECOS] Re: Uart missing chars when in Release

Laurie Gellatly laurie.gellatly@netic.com
Sun Jan 27 11:20:00 GMT 2008


Hi Grant,
>> The missing chars are on the wire - I've snooped them.

>So the receiver is at fault.
Definitely.

>>> I'm not familiar with your platform, but on many platforms
>>> running from flash can be much, much slower than running from
>>> RAM -- in some cases up to maybe 8-10X slower, but 4X slower
>>> is more typical.  Flash often has much slower access times
>>> that RAM and is often narrower than RAM.  2X bus cycles with
>>> 4X access time can add up pretty fast.
>>
>> The same platform also runs an Ethernet interface without
>> problems. 10Mbit is quite a bit faster than 115K baud so I
>> feel I can probably discount that.

>At 117Kbps with no fifo, you have to service a receive
>interrupt at a 11.7KHz or you lose bytes.  That means you've
>got to have an interrupt latency less than 85us.
So I modified ser_16X5X.c to read FIFO threshold (1,4,8 or 14)
characters worth when an RDA interrupt occurs.
With it set to 8 that should give 8 times as long to service
the interrupt. 

>The Ethernet interface only produces an interrupt once per
>frame. I'd be surprised if you're transferring more than a
>hundred frames per second. The Ethernet interface probabably
>also has a buffer queue.  That means that the Ethernet
>interface can tolerate an interrupt latency 10-20X larger than
>the serial interface can tolerate.  The Ethernet service
>routine also probably produces a pretty long interrupt latency
>while its DSR is running.  (It's probably the DSR latency that
>matters rather than the ISR latency.)
Hmm, unfortunately that sounds right.

>Does it stop dropping bytes at lower baud rates?
Try that next.

>Does it stop dropping bytes if there is no Ethernet traffic?
Tried that. No difference.

>Running from flash is almost certainly slower, and I'd wager
>that it increases the interrupt latency beyond what can be
>tolerated by the serial interface's interrupt frequency.
Maybe I should copy ISR or DSR to internal RAM or flash?

>>> Are you seeing rx overrun errors?  If the rx end is running
>>> too slowly for the data rate, you would see rx overrun errors.
>>
>> From what I've read, the OE gets cleared on each read of RBR.
>> How can I check on this? Is there a counter of OE and other
>> errors kept in eCos that I can access?

>You've got the source code, you tell me.  -- I don't know what
>low-level driver you're using. If it doesn't have an OE
>counter, you can add one: it's only a couple lines of code.
Counted the errors - none were shown.

Thanks again for the help.            ...Laurie:{)


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