gmane.comp.systems.archos.rockbox.devel

[ata] wait_for_bsy vs. wait_for_rdy: ATA spec interpretation

Jonas Wielicki — 2012-05-07T16:21:06

Hi folks,

(heh, I hope this won't be too long, but its essentially just a short
question with a „bit“ of context)

I'm still messing with ATA code to debug further SSD issues. Now I
stumbled across what rockbox code does before command issuing. Basically
its like this:

(1) Select the device
(2) wait_for_rdy
(2a) wait_for_bsy (or return with error)
(2a.i) wait until STATUS_BSY is cleared (or timeout)
(2a) wait until STATUS_RDY is set (or timeout)
(3) Setup parameters and issue the command

(see firmware/ata.c, searching for ATA_SELECT for reference, its done at
several places)

However, ATA spec draft 5 (section 9.3, its at page 236 in the version I
have) has the following state graph for the bus idle mode (i.e. before a
command is being executed):


Check_Status:
    BSY = 0 & DRQ = 0 & wrong device selected
      => Device_Select
    BSY = 0 & DRQ = 0 & correct device selected
      => Write_parameters
    BSY = 1 or DRQ = 1
      => Check_Status
Device_Select:
    Device selected
      => Check_Status
Write_parameters:
    ... do command setup etc.


So the spec makes no statement about the RDY bit in the status register,
so we could be timing out here indefinetly under circumstances where the
RDY bit has *not* been set before or am I getting something wrong here?

The reason I'm looking so closely right now is that I get weird timeouts
which I tracked down to wait_for_rdy to fail after device selection.

So I'm just asking back because it seems like this should have lead to
issues before, except if my drive behaves significantly different from
all other drives used in rockbox players. I'm currently testing with
just waiting for BSY to clear, which does not give me issues until now
(however, thats no safe indicator, as the issues I have seem a bit racey).

Summarized:
(1) are we missing a subtle point in the ATA spec here?
(2) if so, why does it not cause errors with most (all) drives?
(2a) maybe due to numerous reset attempts which give RDY bits?
(2a.i) if so, why do these fail on my drive?

cheers,
Jonas

How to debug gapless issues?

Jonas Wielicki — 2012-05-06T16:21:12

Hi folks,

I am still struggling with a gapless (or not) playback issue I'm having
since I got the SSD in my player.

As this is nonstandard hardware, I guess its best when I track the bug
by myself, but I need some advice where to look for potential issues.

My first thought was that it might be due to the SSD being slow when
writing changes to the playlist control file. So I tried to disable all
writing by putting a return 0 right at the start of flush_cached_control
in playlist.c, but that did not fix the issue.

It should be no problem in buffering, as the buffers are pretty full in
the buffering thread debug screen. The songs are all ogg/vorbis, so it
should not be an codec issue; also, everything was fine before the SSD
upgrade.

When turning on Crossfade, after an reboot, crossfading works, but it
feels as if there is a lag between the start of crossfade and the press
of the next button on manual skip. Crossfading works then though. On
end-of-track skipping, there is still a lag and no crossfading (although
I set it to be on Always).

I based my work on the v3.11 branch, however, I could not find any
relevant bugs in the bugtracker for this version which would explain
that behaviour.

So basically I'm looking for pointers on where to look for potential
gap-causers or in general means to debug this problem. Any suggestions?

In the meantime, I also implemented support for the CHECK POWER MODE ata
command which may have fixed another issue but did not help on this one.
Do we have any support for hinting the ATA thread that a read/write is
going to occur in the next few seconds or milliseconds so that it can
spin up the drive in advance? Although I thought that rockbox should not
have an issue with the playlist app blocking on a file write when it
comes to playback (threading for the win!).

To summarize the questions:
(1) What are common gap introducers I might've regressed into?
(2) If its not that, where could gaps be introduced if the hard drive
causes lag?
(3) Are there means to properly debug the device?

best regards
Jonas

ps.: for those who did not follow my previous thread, I am using an
iriver h320 with an SSD.

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Ladies and gentlemen, we have sound on the Creative Zen X-Fi3!

Amaury Pouly — 2012-04-30T17:41:47

I'm pleased to announced that my Creative Zen X-Fi3 successfully played its
first song:
Vincent Cheng - Seasons (Creative Demo)

Hopefully this target is pretty stable, everything basically works except
the recording, speakers, tv encoding and bluetooth of course.

Cheers !

Amaury Pouly

DevConEuro 2012

Frank Gevaerts — 2012-04-27T11:28:56

Hello once more,

DevConEuro 2012 is only three weeks away now. If you plan to attend,
and you haven't done so already, please add your name to the list on
http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/DevConEuro2012.

If you're still looking for a place to stay and need some ideas,
http://www.ibishotel.com/gb/hotel-1456-ibis-hasselt-centrum/index.shtml
is a popular option, with several people already having booked there.
Note that the price currently advertised there for the devcon weekend
is only valid if you book at least 20 days in advance, so it will likely
go up in the next few days. 

Frank

Ladies and gentlemen, we have sound on the Creative Zen X-Fi2!

Amaury Pouly — 2012-04-25T17:49:47

I'm pleased to announced that my Creative Zen X-Fi2 successfully played its
first song:
2Pac - California Love

The port is still very unstable, experimenting random crashes and weirdness
and is still running out of the SD card because of the lack of NAND drive.
On the good side it is very close to the Creative Zen X-Fi3 which also runs
rockbox (without sound unfortunately) so both ports share a lot of code and
will hopefully bring more features to the imx233/ subtarget.

Cheers !

Amaury Pouly

Fixing lags/freezes with SSD in iriver H320

Jonas Wielicki — 2012-04-16T06:58:32

Hello rockbox-dev,

This is basically a repost of of my forum post [1], as I was indicated
to have a try on the mailing list. I'll repost everything here in a
restructured manner + some more details for the sake of completeness though.

I recently replaced the toshiba HDD (which had a hardware defect, i.e.
it only went tick-tick-tick crrrsssh on certain songs and I/O-errord
when trying to access those via USB) in my iriver H320 with a 60GB 1.8"
50-pin IDE SSD (MXSSD1MNANO50-60G). After reinstalling rockbox software
(bootloader was still there ofc), everything worked fine, but a few
minutes of playback later, some errors may (I say may, because the
symptoms differ, see below) occur:
* Playback reliably stops
* “Error accessing playlist control file” - may occur
* Freeze - may occur after the above error; however, freeze might also
be me too unpatient when trying to turn the player off
* Freeze if one tries to do anything with the drive (e.g. accessing
files, loading a theme…)

The first three conditions can be exited “gracefully” by just turning
the player off by holding Stop for a few seconds—just as usual. However,
shutdown takes longer (I suspect a hard turn-off by rockbox at that
place because of timeouts, I read about that in the forums[2] while
doing research about that issue).

I first tried to set the spindown time to 255 in the config file. Didn't
help.

I then went on to try recompiling rockbox with changed settings for my
h320, namely, I changed HAVE_DISK_STORAGE to HAVE_FLASH_STORAGE and
removed HAVE_ATA_POWER_OFF, because I suspected the SSD having issues
with “spinning up” (read about that in the same thread as above).

This did not fix the issue (i know I am using my custom build, as the
version number is now referring to my commit instead of the release
number). I based my changes on the 3.11 git-tag.

So then I had time to follow the buffering thread in the debug menu when
a playback stall occurs. Basically the usefl-value decreases (am I right
when I assume that this is the “useful” part of the undecoded buffer
data?) to zero, after which the pcm buffer depletes which then makes
playback stop. I waited a few seconds, but it did not refill.

More debugging took place since then. Esentially I found out that
playback may stop only for like 30 seconds (*), and continue then. In
that case, the usefl buffer still holds contents, but pcm is empty for a
while. I guess the pcm thread stalls for data due to the buffers being
blocked by a blocking ATA request or similar.
(*) why do I say 30 seconds? This is the timeout I found in ata.c. I did
not measure, but it pretty much feels like 30 seconds.

Also the original firmware seems to cope flawlessly with the SSD. I
played some music jumping from one song through the next with it without
problems yesterday—but there are enough other good reasons to use
rockbox instead.

I read through sources, mainly ata.c and a bit of its surroundings,
storage.c and the (on my target appearantly unused) ata_flash.c, a few
lines of fat.c and codec{,_thread}.c to find a clue. I also skimmed an
ATA specification draft I found linked on wikipedia, but it seems
outdated (for example missing the 0x42 Feature Code you're using).

I made some experiments with disabling sending the disk to sleep etc.,
but that didn't help. It seems like the SSD puts itself to sleep after a
while, because the symptoms which occur with a Disk Spindown Timer of 5
seconds at the end of the first song are the same I have after a few
minutes of playback with all sleeping disabled. However, I've no idea
why waking up does not work in that case.

Furthermore noticed the following oddity in the
ata.c:ata_transfer_sectors code (me being right with the following would
indicate that I understood what's going on there ;) ):
In line 389 (referring to git tag 3.11), we have timeout set to
current_tick+READWRITE_TIMEOUT, the latter being 5*HZ. This is checked
against in line 401, right after the retry:-label. Later on we do
wait_for_start_of_transfer, and on timeout of that we jump to retry.
However, the timeout of wait_for_start_of_transfer occurs after 30*HZ.
So basically, after a perform_soft_reset has taken place, one
deterministically exits with an error without seeing whether it actually
helped.

So to summarize:
* SSD works flawlessly over USB
* Boot and initial buffer filling works fine
* Original software works fine
* Stall (or freeze, if the software waits for the access in the “main
thread” (I call the part main thread which allows me to turn the device
off gracefully Wink )) as soon as a disk access occurs some time later
(not sure after which time this happens exactly)

Sorry for that big wall of text, but I think its reasonable and contains
necessary information for helping and getting help for debugging that
issue :).

best regards,
jonas

[1]: http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,34004.0.html
[2]: http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,23436.0.html

Rockbox 3.11.2 released!

Frank Gevaerts — 2012-04-12T08:45:33

Hello all,

On behalf of the Rockbox developers, I'm very pleased to announce that
Rockbox 3.11.2 has just been released!

Rockbox 3.11.2 fixes several important bugs in Rockbox 3.11 affecting
Sandisk Sansa and Olympus m:robe 100 devices. Please see the release
notes for details:

    http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/ReleaseNotes3112

There are no functional changes.

Go here to download the installer (individual zips are also available):

    http://www.rockbox.org/download/

Unfortunately we haven't managed to fix the outstanding serious issues
with the Ipod Nano 2g yet, so that one still isn't included in the
release.

Frank

DevConEuro2012 date decided!

Frank Gevaerts — 2012-04-11T11:48:52

Hello,

DevConEuro2012 will take place in Hasselt (Belgium) on 18-20 May 2012.

If you're planning to attend, please add your name to the wiki at
http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/DevConEuro2012. While doing that, have a
look at the rest of the page, and fill in other bits as applicable.
Things that spring to mind are hostel/hotel interest, and the agenda.

If you're not planning to attend, please still consider telling us what
to talk about. A DevCon without an agenda is no fun!

Frank

Sansa E200 V1 radio works when reverting to rockbox 3.10 version.

GREG — 2012-04-01T23:36:29



I copied the rockbox version 3.10 version back on to my sansa and it worked.  Let me know of anything else you want me to test. 

Like if you have a new version of rockbox with radio for 3.11. 

Thank You, 

Greg Manhart

English Voice Pack tweak needed

GREG — 2012-04-01T22:31:39



Hello, 

If you have the 3.11 English voice pack downloaded it says Plug Inches instead of Plugins. Could someone tweak the English text? 

Thank You, 

Greg Manhart

Rockbox 3.11 released!

Alex Parker — 2012-04-01T11:35:54

Hello all,

On behalf of the Rockbox developers, I'm very pleased to announce that
Rockbox 3.11 has just been released!


Go here to download the installer (individual zips are also available):

          http://www.rockbox.org/download/

Read up on the most noticeable changes in 3.11:

          http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/ReleaseNotes311

Of note in this release is that due to some serious issues we have been 
forced to downgrade the Ipod Nano 2g to unstable, so it isn't included 
in the 3.11 release. We hope to add it back in a future update.

And above all, enjoy!

Alex

3.11 release candidate builds available

Frank Gevaerts — 2012-03-28T20:37:50

Hello,

I've uploaded some release candidate builds for the 3.11 release to
http://www.hostname.be/3.11RC/ . Please test them and report back,
even if just to say there were no problems (we like those reports!),
either here or on the forums in the 3.11RC thread. The forum thread
about these builds is http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,33873.0.html

Don't forget to mention which exact player you're testing on.

If you encounter bugs, please file bug reports (unless the problem is
already reported), or at least report the bug here or on the forums in
the 3.11RC thread. We'd like 3.11 to be as good as possible.

Note that Rockbox Utility doesn't know about these release candidate
builds, so you'll have to install them manually. The final release will
of course be supported by Rockbox Utility.

There is one major known issue: USB is broken on the ipod nano2g. We
won't release until this has been fixed or worked around.

Frank

DevConEuro 2012 dates

Frank Gevaerts — 2012-03-28T14:33:27

Hello again,

We'd like to decide on the DevConEuro2012 dates as fairly soon now, so
people can start booking flights, trains, boats, and hotels and still
hope to get reasonable rates.

If you want to attend and haven't added your name and possible dates to 
http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/DevCon2012 yet, please do so as soon as
possible.

Frank

Changing build/release terminology

Torne Wuff — 2012-03-28T09:49:18

Hi folks,

I would like to propose that we change our terminology used to
describe the builds and releases, on the website and in Rockbox
Utility. Currently we talk about "release" and "current build" a lot,
and this confuses users over and over who don't understand the
distinction, and I am inclined to agree with people who think this is
confusing.

I propose that we do our best to switch to the following terminology
consistently in our written materials:

1) "Stable release": e.g. stable release 3.10.
2) "Development build": e.g. development build abc123g.
3) "Archived development build": the daily snapshots Rockbox Utility
can install.

I think this would make the distinction much clearer, and it would
also help to make it clear that the daily snapshots are not something
most people should install (currently people often believe they are
somehow more stable/reliable than the current builds, which is not the
case).

Please, reply with your thoughts. I'm not set on these particular
terms, it's just an initial proposal.

Thanks,

re FS#12625 - Sleep timer setting is broken

Jonathan Gordon — 2012-03-27T13:20:37

Hi,

This wasnt caught when the sleep timer changes were commited, and its
not really a big deal but it should be changed.

IIUC the sleep timer is now broken into a few different settings:
1) set timer on boot
2) restart timer on keypress
3) start the timer with the chosen minutes value (arbitrarily set to
5min increments).

Both the first two settings use the 3rd to know how long to start the
timer for manually. The issue in the task is:
1) It isnt a normal setting so cant be added to the quickscreen and
shortcuts menu (minor inconvinience)
2) cancelling the setting screen enables the timer anyway. - BAD!

I don't understand why setting the sleep timer duration for boot
should be linked to the sleep timer duration i want to set
temporarily. (i.e the current system means unless I have a fixed.cfg
it is impossible for me to set a 30min timer before i go to bed and
have it turn on with a 90min timer).

The duration should be a separate setting and the "start sleep timer"
menu item should then be changed to start at "off" so pressing cancel
will not enable a timer.
In addition, extra handling for the sleep timer can be manually added
to the shortcuts screen to start/stop a timer.

Jonathan.

DevConEuro 2012

Frank Gevaerts — 2012-03-18T14:59:44

OK, I've not seen other proposals, so DevConEuro2012 will take place in
Hasselt. I've started the usual wiki pages.

If you want to attend, please add your name and suitable dates to
http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/DevCon2012.

There's general information about the location and how to get there
on http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/DevConEuro2012.

What's still missing on the wiki is instructions on how to find the
correct building and door from the car park. I'll add an illustrated
guide later.

One thing I forgot to mention earlier is that the location is upstairs
(one floor up), and doesn't have a lift, so it's not suited for
wheelchairs.

Frank

3.11 release status

Frank Gevaerts — 2012-03-18T13:40:12

Hello everyone

The release schedule said we were going to release today, but
unfortunately there are some nasty bugs left, mainly with USB on the
ipod nano 2G. Until this is fixed releasing is not a very good idea.

This means we'll delay the release until at least next week. I hope
everything will be ready by then, but there are of course no guarantees.

There is a bit of good news though for those who want to work on new
features: the move to git makes merging bugfixes to the release branch
much easier, so there's no real need for holding back on invasive
changes like there used to be in the svn days.

Frank

[Review Request] Constrain get_next_dir() to directories below global_settings.start_directory. (#182)

Nick Peskett — 2012-03-14T09:16:35

 From the commit description;

If the user has set "Start File Browser Here" (config.cfg: start 
directory) to anything other than root and "Auto-Change Directory" is 
set to "Yes" or "Random", the directory returned when an auto change is 
required will be constrained to the value of "start directory" or below.

http://gerrit.rockbox.org/r/#/c/182/

A DevCon proposal

Frank Gevaerts — 2012-03-12T20:03:21

Hello,

It appears I can organise DevCon2012 at work, in Hasselt, Belgium.

The location has a meeting room that should be able to hold the usual
DevCon crowd (i.e. 10 to 15 people), although it's not very big. There's
some open space in the building though, so we can manage overflows
without too many problems.

There's an internet connection that should be fast enough for what we need,
and enough coffee to make people happy, and the meeting room had a new
air conditioning unit installed last year (and I know how to control
it!).

For food, there are: a supermarket, self service restaurant, and fast
food places within DAP-throwing distance, other places are bit further
away.

Hasselt has a decent selection of hotels in various price ranges, and
there's a hostel about 10km away. This isn't a large metropolitan area
though, so don't expect public transport at 3am.

Ideally we'd have a few cars available to get everyone around, but I
think we should be able to get those.

Getting to Hasselt from Brussels Airport is reasonably easy by train,
with just one change and about one hour and a quarter travel time,
although you might be able to get a ride from a passing former DevCon
organiser if you're lucky.

(for the curious: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=50.938487,5.302581)

Frank

PS: the best way to make this proposal even better is to spur me on with
competition, so please propose your competing locations!

Branched for 3.11

Frank Gevaerts — 2012-03-11T22:47:35

Hello everyone

We have branched for 3.11.

This means master is open for new features again, but bugfixes of course
remain very welcome.

If all goes well, we'll release in a week. There are some known bugs
that might delay the release a bit though, so don't flame us if we're a
bit late.

You can get the new branch using "git checkout v3.11", and changes for
the stable release can be pushed to refs/for/v3.11 if you want them to
be reviewed.

Frank