At 04:20 PM 12/25/99 , Lennart Augustsson wrote:
>I'm looking at a driver for a USB Ethernet adapter (with the ADMtek Pegasus chip).
>In principle the chip looks quite straightforward to handle, but there is a big snag.
>
>It seems that in network drivers most of the processing happens in interrupt routines;
>a receiver interrupt to deliver a packet up, a transmitter interrupt to send the next one,
>the watchdog routine to reset the chip etc.
>All these routines need to access registers in the chip, and here comes the problem.  You
>cannot easily access the registers.  An access to a chip register requires a USB bus
>transaction, but these take a long time and need to use tsleep() (which is banned in
>interrupt context).
>So there are several ways to handle this:
>  * Use delay() instead of tsleep().  This is totally unacceptable, since it would make the
>    driver busy-wait for about 1 ms.  (FYI, the FreeBSD driver does this.)
>  * Use a state machine (which can be coded in many ways).  This means that a register access
>    will now be a two step operation: start the access and call a completion routine to
>    do the rest of the job.  This is quite tedious.. :(
>  * Use a kernel thread for driver.  The interrupt routine would then just wake up the
>    kernel thread and have it complete the operation.  The problem with this is that
>    I think you need at least two threads for the driver to avoid deadlock.  This seems
>    excessive.  :(

In this instance I'd use a kernel thread for the majority of the stuff but think about making
the frequently done stuff via a state machine to avoid context switches.  Since USB Ethernet
can't be full duplex (right?), why would you need more than one thread per device?

Simply the logic would be a loop doing: (handle any ioctl, transmit a single packet, 
receive a packet).
-- 
Matt Thomas               Internet:   matt@3am-software.com
3am Software Foundry      WWW URL:    http://www.3am-software.com/bio/matt/
Cupertino, CA             Disclaimer: I avow all knowledge of this message