I saw that DT overlay support was re-introduced in the recent pre-4.1 kernel drop, and testing was requested …
I have a prototype cape with a SPI interface that works well with spidev in the 3.14 kernel line, so thought I’d try the new version. The kernel update, dtc install and the existing overlays installed smoothly, and I added a spidev dts overlay without any issues. However, the SPI driver appears to have an issue.
Basically, doing transfers using the user space spidev interface seems to reliably hang as soon as the transfer size causes a switch to DMA mode (160 bytes). This doesn’t require a cape at all, just doing any transfer seems to readily reproduce the problem.
The user space program hangs hard, and the spi1 kernel thread hangs as well. Eventually the kernel detects the hang - dmesg output:
[ 360.663769] INFO: task spi1:565 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
[ 360.670334] Not tainted 4.1.0-rc6-bone6 #1
[ 360.675277] “echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs” disables this message.
[ 360.683573] spi1 D c05e5585 0 565 2 0x00000000
[ 360.683680] [] (__schedule) from [] (schedule+0x2f/0x64)
[ 360.683732] [] (schedule) from [] (schedule_timeout+0x109/0x14c)
[ 360.683778] [] (schedule_timeout) from [] (wait_for_common+0x5d/0xd0)
[ 360.683845] [] (wait_for_common) from [] (omap2_mcspi_transfer_one_message+0x706/0xdf4 [spi_omap2_mcspi])
[ 360.683922] [] (omap2_mcspi_transfer_one_message [spi_omap2_mcspi]) from [] (__spi_pump_messages+0x275/0x3d0)
[ 360.683970] [] (__spi_pump_messages) from [] (kthread_worker_fn+0x49/0xf4)
[ 360.684009] [] (kthread_worker_fn) from [] (kthread+0x9b/0xb0)
[ 360.684055] [] (kthread) from [] (ret_from_fork+0x11/0x30)
This is easily reproduced with dd - a working write at 159 bytes:
root@arm:/home/debian# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/spidev1.0 bs=159 count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
159 bytes (159 B) copied, 0.00497733 s, 31.9 kB/s
And a hang at 160 bytes:
root@arm:/home/debian# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/spidev1.0 bs=160 count=1
Kernel version:
$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 4.1.0-rc6-bone6 (root@b2-omap5-uevm-2gb) (gcc version 4.9.2 (Debian 4.9.2-10) ) #1 Mon Jun 1 21:27:44 UTC 2015
It is fairly obvious in linux/drivers/spi/spi-omap2-mcspi.c::170 “#define DMA_MIN_BYTES 160” that the problem is with DMA mode transfers.
I’m not sure this is the right forum for reporting driver issues like this - if anyone can point me to a more appropriate venue, please feel free …
Thanks,
–Matt Hughes