[U-Boot] [PATCH] FIX: fat: Provide correct return code from disk_{read|write} to upper layers

Lukasz Majewski l.majewski at samsung.com
Wed Sep 23 10:40:48 CEST 2015


Hi Stephen,

> On 09/03/2015 08:18 AM, Lukasz Majewski wrote:
> > Hi Lukasz,
> > 
> >> Hi Tom,
> >>
> >>> On Thu, Sep 03, 2015 at 02:21:39PM +0200, Lukasz Majewski wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> It is very common that FAT code is using following pattern:
> >>>> if (disk_{read|write}() < 0)
> >>>>         return -1;
> >>>>
> >>>> Up till now the above code was dead, since disk_{read|write)
> >>>> could only return value >= 0.
> >>>> As a result some errors from medium layer (i.e. eMMC/SD) were not
> >>>> caught.
> >>>>
> >>>> The above behavior was caused by block_{read|write|erase}
> >>>> declared at struct block_dev_desc (@part.h). It returns unsigned
> >>>> long, where 0 indicates error and > 0 indicates that medium
> >>>> operation was correct.
> >>>>
> >>>> This patch as error regards 0 returned from
> >>>> block_{read|write|erase} when nr_blocks is grater than zero.
> >>>> Read/Write operation with nr_blocks=0 should return 0 and hence
> >>>> is not considered as an error.
> >>>>
> >>>> Signed-off-by: Lukasz Majewski <l.majewski at samsung.com>
> >>>>
> >>>> Test HW: Odroid XU3 - Exynos 5433
> >>>
> >>> Can you pick up Stephen's FAT replacement series and see if it
> >>> also fixes this problem?  Thanks!
> >>>
> >>
> >> Ok, I will test this fat implementation.
> > 
> > I've applied v2 of this patchset
> > on top of SHA1: 79c884d7e449a63fa8f07b7495f8f9873355c48f
> > 
> > Unfortunately, DFU tests fail with first attempt to pass the test.
> 
> I've found a couple of problems.
> 
> First up, file_fat_write() wasn't truncating the file when writing, so
> the file size wasn't changing when over-writing a large file with a
> small file. With this fixed, I can run the DFU tests just fine for all
> the small files (<1M). I've fixed this locally and in the ff branch on
> my github.

Nice to hear that you have found the error.

> 
> Second, ff is slow:
> 
> Some random old build I had in flash on my system:
> > Tegra124 (Jetson TK1) # load mmc 1:1 $loadaddr dfu1.bin
> > reading dfu1.bin
> > 1048576 bytes read in 95 ms (10.5 MiB/s)
> 
> With my ff branch:
> > Tegra124 (Jetson TK1) # load mmc 1:1 $loadaddr dfu1.bin
> > 1048576 bytes read in 5038 ms (203.1 KiB/s)
> 
> That's quite the slow-down! I believe this is causing dfu-util to time
> out on the larger files (1M+). Just for functional testing, I'll try
> and find a way to hack dfu-util to have a much larger timeout for the
> final flush operation. I wonder if the old FAT implementation had a
> disk cache (e.g. that 32K buffer in BSS?) and we need the same for
> ff? 

I think that our current Fat implementation is optimized for tiny
embedded system (and probably no cache).

> I'll try and track down why it's so slow.
> 
> Perhaps there are other issues as yet unfound.

We might also check with sandbox FS set of tests.

-- 
Best regards,

Lukasz Majewski

Samsung R&D Institute Poland (SRPOL) | Linux Platform Group


More information about the U-Boot mailing list