Weekly report - Week 7

Status:

• Switched to a more recent kernel, based on 2.6.34, to make sure I have the latest bug fixes, as recommended by Ajay.
  
• I shifted focus towards debugging the MUSB driver, and particularly the code path used when DMA is used. It could be possible to debug the MUSB driver using my proxy driver, connecting the webcam, but the transfer rate and packet sizes are rather unpredictable, making it hard to reproduce problems.
  
• My first idea was to program a Cypress FX2 to stream isochronous packets, connect the FX2 to the BeagleBoard, with my proxy driver. I tried to find some ready-made test firmwares, without much success: none of these tested isochronous transfers, and most of them were written for the Cypress EZ-USB chip (i.e., a (incompatible) predecessor to the FX2).
  
• Since the problem lies in the MUSB driver, I don't really need to use my proxy driver. I found a testing gadgetfs driver, which supports isochronous transfers. I could then hack the driver to force it to send short packets, triggering the MUSB bug (some instructions can be found here).

Plans:

• Continue debugging the MUSB driver with short isochronous packets. If I cannot find a solution after a few days, I'll report the problem to the linux-usb list.
  
• High-throughput endpoints are not supported in the MUSB driver, that's something I could try to implement.

Risks:

• Debugging the MUSB driver is a bit difficult: since isochronous are delay sensitive, displaying some debugging messages causes packet losses.