• Gianluca Gennari's avatar
    [media] em28xx: pre-allocate DVB isoc transfer buffers · 86d38d1e
    Gianluca Gennari authored
    On MIPS/ARM set-top-boxes, as well as old x86 PCs, memory allocation failures
    in the em28xx driver are common, due to memory fragmentation over time, that
    makes impossible to allocate large chunks of coherent memory.
    A typical system with 256/512 MB of RAM fails after just 1 day of uptime (see
    the old thread for detailed reports and crashlogs).
    
    In fact, the em28xx driver allocates memory for USB isoc transfers at runtime,
    as opposite to the dvb-usb drivers that allocates the USB buffers when the
    device is initialized, and frees them when the device is disconnected.
    
    Moreover, in digital mode the USB isoc transfer buffers are freed, allocated
    and cleared every time the user selects a new channel, wasting time and
    resources.
    
    This patch solves both problems by allocating DVB isoc transfer buffers in
    em28xx_usb_probe(), and freeing them in em28xx_usb_disconnect().
    In fact, the buffers size and number depend only on the max USB packet size
    that is parsed from the USB descriptors in em28xx_usb_probe(), so it can
    never change for a given device.
    
    This approach makes no sense in analog mode (as the buffer size depends on
    the alternate mode selected at runtime), the patch creates two separate sets
    of buffers for digital and analog modes.
    
    For digital-only devices, USB buffers are created when the device is probed
    and freed when the device is disconnected.
    For analog-only devices, nothing changes: isoc buffers are created at runtime.
    For hybrid devices, two sets of buffers are maintained: the digital-mode
    buffers are created when the device is probed, and freed when the device is
    disconnected; analog-mode buffers are created/destroyed at runtime as before.
    So, in analog mode, digital and analog buffers coexists at the same time: this
    can be justified by the fact that digital mode is by far more commonly used
    nowadays, so it makes sense to optimize the driver for this use case scenario.
    
    The patch has been tested in the last few days on a x86 PC and a MIPS
    set-top-box, with the PCTV 290e (digital only) and the Terratec Hybrid XS
    (hybrid device). With the latter, I switched several times between analog and
    digital mode (Kaffeine/TvTime) with no issue at all.
    I unplugged/plugged the devices several times with no problem.
    Also, after over 3 days of normal usage in the MPIS set-top-box, the PCTV 290e
    was still up and running.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarGianluca Gennari <gennarone@gmail.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@redhat.com>
    86d38d1e
em28xx-cards.c 99.2 KB