[Barrelfish-users] No serial input

[Baumann Andrew]

Hi Simon,

I don't think this is the problem. serial_bind_cb() checks for state->want_stdin, and if so sends the associate_stdin message whenever it runs. This may be after terminal_want_stdin has returned, but that's fine as long as the message send doesn't fail. There is a problem that it has no way to report the error code if the message send fails, but in the current tree this should just result in an assertion failure and crash of the program, not silent failure. The only way I could see this failing silently in the way you describe is if you're compiling without assertions, in which case the error will go undetected. There should really be a USER_PANIC_ERR call in there rather than just an assertion to catch this.

Cheers,
Andrew

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Simon Gerber [mailto:simu at vis.ethz.ch]
> Sent: Tuesday, 8 November 2011 13:06
> To: barrelfish-users at lists.inf.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [Barrelfish-users] No serial input
> 
> Hi,
> 
>  From what I can tell, if terminal_want_stdin needs to look up and bind
> to the serial service, the code after the lookup runs before the bind_cb
> completes and thus the check for state->serial != NULL before
> associating stdin fails and terminal_want_stdin returns with SYS_ERR_OK
> without having actually grabbed stdin.
> 
> I assume this should be fixed by busy-waiting on the completion of
> serial_bind_cb? Or is there a better way of doing this?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> -- Simon Gerber
> 
> On Sun, 6 Nov 2011 17:26:47 +0000, Baumann  Andrew wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > This sounds like a startup race. I can't tell you the solution, but I
> > can give you clues where to look: lib/barrelfish/terminal.c
> > terminal_init() does a  nonblocking lookup for the serial driver, and
> > if it is already registered, it connects to it. Otherwise if it isn't
> > already present, fish's main() will start without a binding to the
> > serial driver, but the call to terminal_want_stdin() should cause the
> > binding to be established (this time in a blocking fashion), assuming
> > you didn't pass "keyboard" as one of the command-line parameters to
> > fish. I would stick some debug into terminal.c and try to understand
> > what is happening when you block.
> >
> > Hope this helps,
> > Andrew
> >
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Mark Nevill [mailto:nevillm at ethz.ch]
> >> Sent: Thursday, 3 November 2011 16:01
> >> To: barrelfish-users at lists.inf.ethz.ch
> >> Subject: [Barrelfish-users] No serial input
> >>
> >> Hi everyone!
> >>
> >> When booting Barrelfish repeatedly in qemu, rarely the two lines
> >> below
> >> appear:
> >>
> >> chips: client waiting for serial
> >> chips: notifying client about serial
> >>
> >> If these lines appear, fish does not receive serial input.
> >>
> >> This particularly affects our pending merge of our AHCI driver
> >> project, as we get these messages far more often (this is probably
> >> due
> >> to the AHCI driver delaying the initialisation of the serial
> >> driver).
> >>
> >> Has anybody else encountered this issue?
> >>
> >> Regards,
> >>
> >> -- Mark & Simon
> >>
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> 
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