Re: [PATCH] Staging: comedi: add timeouts to while loops in s626.c

[Ian Abbott <abbotti@mev.co.uk>]

On 2014-03-01 05:48, Chase Southwood wrote:
> On Friday, February 28, 2014 11:26 AM, Ian Abbott <abbotti@mev.co.uk> wrote:
>> On 2014-02-28 07:35, Chase Southwood wrote:
>>> And finally, are timeouts here even necessary or helpful, or are there
>>> any better ways to do it?
>>
>> In the case of s626_send_dac(), it doesn't seem to be used in any
>> critical sections, so it could make use of Hartley's comedi_timeout().
>>
>> Some of the timeout errors could be propagated, especially for
>> s626_send_dac() which is only reachable from very few paths.
>>
>
> Awesome, I'll swap all of my timeouts out for comedi_timeout() in s626_send_dac().
> As for propagating the timeout errors, could you please clarify that a bit further?  Both of the functions
> which I add timeouts inside of in this patch return void, and so in their current state they cannot return any error
> values.  Would you like them (or at least s626_send_dac()) to instead return an error upon timeout/or success on success,
> or am I just totally misunderstanding your meaning of propagate here?

s626_send_dac() could be changed to return an int value 0 on success or 
-ETIMEDOUT on timeout.  s626_set_dac() and s626_write_trim_dac() could 
be changed to return an int - just return the result of s626_send_dac(). 
  Similarly, the result of those functions could be either propagated 
upwards.  This could all be done in a separate patch (or patches).

>> There are other infinite loops involving calls to the s626_mc_test()
>> function, but those could be dealt with by other patches.
>
> Yeah, I saw those...I'll whip up a patch for them, just wanted to verify that everything looks pretty good here
> before I started on that.  I'll have that right out!

Yes, anything is an improvement on an infinite loop waiting for the 
hardware to do something!

-- 
-=( Ian Abbott @ MEV Ltd.    E-mail: <abbotti@mev.co.uk>        )=-
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