John Linn wrote:

Hi Kevin,

I didn't write the code but I know the driver somewhat.

I think the intention of stopping the timer is to prevent the reentrancy
as the comment says because there is a function, gmii_poll, that is
setup on the timer to go read the phy registers to see if anything
changed in the phy. 

Stopping the timer prevents a phy read from happening in gmii_poll in
the middle of the ioctl phy read which could hose things up.

I don't see why you couldn't change that timer stop to some other form
of synchronization/mutual exclusion so that the phy reads don't collide.

As I look at it, it appears to me the spinlock should provide the
synchronization needed without stopping the timer, but maybe I'm missing
something. I CCed John Bonesio as he's the guy that developed this code
I believe and maybe he'll have more insight here.

Thanks,
John

I removed the timer code, and it seems to be working correctly, hopefully
the spin lock is all I need to lock out the polling function.  Thanks for
you help

Kevin
-- 
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Xilinx-Temac-Timer---tp16306218p16332251.html
Sent from the linuxppc-embedded mailing list archive at Nabble.com.