People have been reporting that PPP connections over ptys, such as
used with PPTP, will hang randomly when transferring large amounts of
data, for instance in http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6530.
I have managed to reproduce the problem, and the patch below fixes the
actual cause.
The problem is not in fact in ppp_async.c but in n_tty.c. What
happens is that when pptp reads from the pty, we call read_chan() in
drivers/char/n_tty.c on the master side of the pty. That copies all
the characters out of its buffer to userspace and then calls
check_unthrottle(), which calls the pty unthrottle routine, which
calls tty_wakeup on the slave side, which calls ppp_asynctty_wakeup,
which calls tasklet_schedule. So far so good. Since we are in
process context, the tasklet runs immediately and calls
ppp_async_process(), which calls ppp_async_push, which calls the
tty->driver->write function to send some more output.
However, tty->driver->write() returns zero, because the master
tty->receive_room is still zero. We haven't returned from
check_unthrottle() yet, and read_chan() only updates tty->receive_room
_after_ calling check_unthrottle. That means that the driver->write
call in ppp_async_process() returns 0. That would be fine if we were
going to get a subsequent wakeup call, but we aren't (we just had it,
and the buffer is now empty).
The solution is for n_tty.c to update tty->receive_room _before_
calling the driver unthrottle routine. The patch below does this.
With this patch I was able to transfer a 900MB file over a PPTP
connection (taking about 25 minutes), whereas without the patch the
connection would always stall in under a minute.
Signed-off-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Semaphore to mutex conversion.
The conversion was generated via scripts, and the result was validated
automatically via a script as well.
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Cc: Russell King <rmk@arm.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
The API and code have been through various bits of initial review by
serial driver people but they definitely need to live somewhere for a
while so the unconverted drivers can get knocked into shape, existing
drivers that have been updated can be better tuned and bugs whacked out.
This replaces the tty flip buffers with kmalloc objects in rings. In the
normal situation for an IRQ driven serial port at typical speeds the
behaviour is pretty much the same, two buffers end up allocated and the
kernel cycles between them as before.
When there are delays or at high speed we now behave far better as the
buffer pool can grow a bit rather than lose characters. This also means
that we can operate at higher speeds reliably.
For drivers that receive characters in blocks (DMA based, USB and
especially virtualisation) the layer allows a lot of driver specific
code that works around the tty layer with private secondary queues to be
removed. The IBM folks need this sort of layer, the smart serial port
people do, the virtualisers do (because a virtualised tty typically
operates at infinite speed rather than emulating 9600 baud).
Finally many drivers had invalid and unsafe attempts to avoid buffer
overflows by directly invoking tty methods extracted out of the innards
of work queue structs. These are no longer needed and all go away. That
fixes various random hangs with serial ports on overflow.
The other change in here is to optimise the receive_room path that is
used by some callers. It turns out that only one ldisc uses receive room
except asa constant and it updates it far far less than the value is
read. We thus make it a variable not a function call.
I expect the code to contain bugs due to the size alone but I'll be
watching and squashing them and feeding out new patches as it goes.
Because the buffers now dynamically expand you should only run out of
buffering when the kernel runs out of memory for real. That means a lot of
the horrible hacks high performance drivers used to do just aren't needed any
more.
Description:
tty_insert_flip_char is an old API and continues to work as before, as does
tty_flip_buffer_push() [this is why many drivers dont need modification]. It
does now also return the number of chars inserted
There are also
tty_buffer_request_room(tty, len)
which asks for a buffer block of the length requested and returns the space
found. This improves efficiency with hardware that knows how much to
transfer.
and tty_insert_flip_string_flags(tty, str, flags, len)
to insert a string of characters and flags
For a smart interface the usual code is
len = tty_request_buffer_room(tty, amount_hardware_says);
tty_insert_flip_string(tty, buffer_from_card, len);
More description!
At the moment tty buffers are attached directly to the tty. This is causing a
lot of the problems related to tty layer locking, also problems at high speed
and also with bursty data (such as occurs in virtualised environments)
I'm working on ripping out the flip buffers and replacing them with a pool of
dynamically allocated buffers. This allows both for old style "byte I/O"
devices and also helps virtualisation and smart devices where large blocks of
data suddenely materialise and need storing.
So far so good. Lots of drivers reference tty->flip.*. Several of them also
call directly and unsafely into function pointers it provides. This will all
break. Most drivers can use tty_insert_flip_char which can be kept as an API
but others need more.
At the moment I've added the following interfaces, if people think more will
be needed now is a good time to say
int tty_buffer_request_room(tty, size)
Try and ensure at least size bytes are available, returns actual room (may be
zero). At the moment it just uses the flipbuf space but that will change.
Repeated calls without characters being added are not cumulative. (ie if you
call it with 1, 1, 1, and then 4 you'll have four characters of space. The
other functions will also try and grow buffers in future but this will be a
more efficient way when you know block sizes.
int tty_insert_flip_char(tty, ch, flag)
As before insert a character if there is room. Now returns 1 for success, 0
for failure.
int tty_insert_flip_string(tty, str, len)
Insert a block of non error characters. Returns the number inserted.
int tty_prepare_flip_string(tty, strptr, len)
Adjust the buffer to allow len characters to be added. Returns a buffer
pointer in strptr and the length available. This allows for hardware that
needs to use functions like insl or mencpy_fromio.
Signed-off-by: Alan Cox <alan@redhat.com>
Cc: Paul Fulghum <paulkf@microgate.com>
Signed-off-by: Hirokazu Takata <takata@linux-m32r.org>
Signed-off-by: Serge Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Jeff Dike <jdike@addtoit.com>
Signed-off-by: John Hawkes <hawkes@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Fix the sparse warning "implicit cast to nocast type"
Signed-off-by: Victor Fusco <victor@cetuc.puc-rio.br>
Signed-off-by: Domen Puncer <domen@coderock.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
The patch fixes a few corner cases around tty line editing with
very long input lines:
- n_tty_receive_char(): don't simply drop eol characters,
otherwise canon_data isn't increased and the reader isn't woken
up.
- n_tty_receive_room(): If there is no newline pending and the
edit buffer is full, allow only a single character to be written
(until eol is found and the line is flushed), so characters from
the next line aren't dropped.
- write_chan(): if an incomplete line was written, continue
writing until write() returns 0, otherwise it might not write
the eol character to flush the line and the writer goes to sleep
without ever being woken up.
BTW the core problem is that part of this should be handled in the
receive_buf path, but for this it has to return the number of
written characters, as the amount of written characters may not be
the same as the amount of characters going into the write buffer,
so the receive_room() usage in pty_write() is not really reliable.
Alan said:
The problem looks valid. The behaviour of 'traditional unix' appears to
be the following
If you exceed the line limit then beep and drop the character
Always allow EOL to complete a canonical line input
Always do signal/control processing if enabled
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
Paul Mackerras