Atheros single stream AR9285 and AR9271 have half the PCU TX FIFO
buffer size of that of dual stream devices. Dual stream devices
have a max PCU TX FIFO size of 8 KB while single stream devices
have 4 KB. Single stream devices have an issue though and require
hardware only to use half of the amount of its capable PCU TX FIFO
size, 2 KB and this requires a change in software.
Technically a change would not have been required (except for frame
burst considerations of 128 bytes) if these devices would have been
able to use the full 4 KB of the PCU TX FIFO size but our systems
engineers recommend 2 KB to be used only. We enforce this through
software by reducing the max frame triggger level to 2 KB.
Fixing the max frame trigger level should then have a few benefits:
* The PER will now be adjusted as designed for underruns when the
max trigger level is reached. This should help alleviate the
bus as the rate control algorithm chooses a slower rate which
should ensure frames are transmitted properly under high system
bus load.
* The poll we use on our TX queues should now trigger and work
as designed for single stream devices. The hardware passes
data from each TX queue on the PCU TX FIFO queue respecting each
queue's priority. The new trigger level ensures this seeding of
the PCU TX FIFO queue occurs as designed which could mean avoiding
false resets and actually reseting hw correctly when a TX queue
is indeed stuck.
* Some undocumented / unsupported behaviour could have been triggered
when the max trigger level level was being set to 4 KB on single
stream devices. Its not clear what this issue was to me yet.
Cc: Kyungwan Nam <kyungwan.nam@atheros.com>
Cc: Bennyam Malavazi <bennyam.malavazi@atheros.com>
Cc: Stephen Chen <stephen.chen@atheros.com>
Cc: Shan Palanisamy <shan.palanisamy@atheros.com>
Cc: Paul Shaw <paul.shaw@atheros.com>
Signed-off-by: Vasanthakumar Thiagarajan <vasanth@atheros.com>
Signed-off-by: Luis R. Rodriguez <lrodriguez@atheros.com>
Signed-off-by: John W. Linville <linville@tuxdriver.com>
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