Re: are ioctl calls supposed to take this long?

[Richard B. Johnson]

On Fri, 6 Jul 2001, Chris Friesen wrote:

> "Richard B. Johnson" wrote:
> > 
> > On Fri, 6 Jul 2001, Chris Friesen wrote:
> > 
> > > I am using the following snippet of code to find out some information about the
> > > MII PHY interface of my ethernet device (which uses the tulip driver).  When I
> > > did some timing measurements with gettimeofday() I found that the ioctl call
> > > takes a bit over a millisecond to complete.  This seems to me to be an awfully
> > > long time for what should be (as far as I can see) a very simple operation.
> 
> > It's not ioctl() overhead, it's what has to be done in the driver to
> > get the information you request.
> > 
> > (1)     Stop the chip
> > (2)     Read the media interface using an awful SERIAL protocol in which
> >         you manipulate 3 bits using multiple instructions, to send
> >         or receive a single BIT (not BYTE) of data. You do the 8 times
> >         per byte.
> > (3)     Restart the chip.
> 
> Are you sure about this?  In the tulip.c driver the following appears to be the
> salient code:
> 
> static int private_ioctl(struct device *dev, struct ifreq *rq, int cmd)
> {
> 	struct tulip_private *tp = (struct tulip_private *)dev->priv;
> 	long ioaddr = dev->base_addr;
> 	u16 *data = (u16 *)&rq->ifr_data;
> 	int phy = tp->phys[0] & 0x1f;
> 	long flags;
> 
> 	switch(cmd) {
> 	case SIOCDEVPRIVATE:		/* Get the address of the PHY in use. */
> 		if (tp->mii_cnt)
> 			data[0] = phy;
> 		else if (tp->flags & HAS_NWAY143)
> 			data[0] = 32;
> 		else if (tp->chip_id == COMET)
> 			data[0] = 1;
> 		else
> 			return -ENODEV;
>
               ..... This falls through to 
	SIOCDEVPRIVATE+1
 
> 
> I don't see any device stopping or reading of the media interface here.  Now
> there may be something very subtle hidden somewhere that I'm not seeing, but
> this looks like some relatively straightforward comparisons.

Look at tulip_mdio_read() and the zillions of times it's called.
It's called in SIOCDEVPRIVATE+1 when SIOCDEVPRIVATE falls through.
It falls through always, unless there is the -ENODEV error.
tulip_mdio_read() does the bit-banging junk.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson

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