On Tue, 21 Apr 2009, David VomLehn wrote: > The current patch already uses a waitqueue and wakes up as soon as a console > is registered, so that's the same. I agree that the other piece is determining > when all USB devices at boot time have been probed. For this suggestion to > work, two conditions must be met: > 1. The USB hub driver becoming idle must indicate that every device has > been probed. That's not exactly right. When a new hub is registered, the hub driver doesn't become idle until after all the devices plugged into that hub have been initialized and probed. So the hub driver becoming idle indicates that every device attached to any registered USB host controller has been probed, but there may still be some unregistered controllers. This won't be an issue if you first wait for all the new async probing stuff to end; by then all the PCI devices (including USB host controllers) should be registered. > 2. The USB driver must become idle after every USB device has been > probed. Under normal conditions it will. There are some abnormal conditions which cause the hub driver never to become idle, such as a faulty device that continually connects and disconnects itself electrically to/from the USB bus. (Each connection event will create more work for the hub driver.) I have seen reports of this sort of thing. I guess a better criterion would be for the hub driver to maintain a count of registered but unscanned hubs. That wouldn't be subject to quite the same starvation issue. Although there is another issue which occasionally comes up with buggy devices: The hub driver's device-initialization procedure has so many retries and timeouts that it can take several minutes before the driver gives up on a bad device. > If both conditions are met, this is a superior to a timeout for determining > that the console will not show up. It would surprise me a bit if the first > condition was true. Why? Doesn't it make sense that the hub driver would remain running as long as there was still work for it do to? > Still, if it is true that the USB hub driver will be > idle for some interval I, where I is greater than the timeout we would > otherwise use, it is still a better approach. > > There is one other possible gotcha to this approach. The code as I wrote it is > bus-agnostic, i.e. it has no idea where the console is located. As far as > I know, the long time to probe possible console devices only arises with > USB. If this is not tree, we need to handle any other cases that can arise. That is a very good objection. For this sort of approach to work, ultimately it would have to be implemented for every hotpluggable bus of interest. > > > But a bigger > > > drawback is that you lose the ability to chose appropriate intervals for > > > different classes of devices. > > > > Why do you need to choose any intervals at all? Just keep waiting > > until you know there's no point waiting any longer. If you stop > > waiting before then, you run the risk of missing a device that could > > have worked. > > The question about appropriate intervals is that I need to wait for some > devices, like consoles and network devices, but not all devices, like printers > and cameras. There is no telling whether any two devices require the same > interval when I am tuning it for my particular system. And if I have a USB > console and no USB Ethernet device, I only want to wait for the console > probe interval. I still don't understand. Let's say you want the console init code to wait for the preferred console device to be registered, and that device could potentially be either a USB serial or a USB network device. And let's say that your system has a USB serial device but no USB network devices. The console delay routine will then wait until the USB serial device is discovered and registered, at which point its job is done. It won't continue to wait until all the USB devices present at boot time have been probed, since there's no reason to wait after the first console device is discovered. So not only would you not need to tune two different delay times, you wouldn't even need to tune one! You wouldn't need to specify any delay times at all. > I'm kinda flexible about whether all possible consoles show up; the patch > presently only waits for a console to be identified as the "preferred" console. > This gets the system going as soon as you have some place to write output, > but I won't argue with anyone who says we need to wait for all possible > consoles. Which essentially means waiting until _all_ the devices present at boot time (both USB and non-USB) have been probed. Right? And it explicitly means ruling out waiting for new devices which the user might plug in after the system has booted, since a new console device could be plugged in at any time. > > Now the only drawback I can see would crop up if some device takes a > > very long time to probe (perhaps because of errors and retries). If > > there's no other console device, it could slow down the boot procedure > > quite a lot. But there doesn't appear to be any logical alternative, > > given your goals as stated above. > > If there is a way to guarantee that we are done with the probing, I'm > all for using that. Will waiting for the USB hub driver to be idle do this? I'm pretty sure something like it can be made to work, subject to the delays caused by bad devices. Alan Stern -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-usb" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
