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: Gianluca Gennari <gennarone@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@redhat.com>
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