I am writing code for a USB device. Suppose the USB host starts a control read transfer to read some data from the device, and the amount of data requested (wLength in the Setup Packet) is a multiple of the Endpoint 0 max packet size. Then after the host has received all the data (in the form of several IN transactions with maximum-sized data packets), will it initiate another IN transaction to see if there is more data even though there can't be more?
Here's an example sequence of events that I am wondering about:
USB enumeration process: max packet size on endpoint 0 is reported to be 64.
SETUP-DATA-ACK transaction starts a control read transfer, wLength = 128.
IN-DATA-ACK transaction delivers first 64 bytes of data to host.
IN-DATA-ACK transaction delivers last 64 bytes of data to host.
IN-DATA-ACK with zero-length DATA packet? Does this transaction ever happen?
OUT-DATA-ACK transaction completes Status Phase of the transfer; transfer is over.
I tested this on my computer (Windows Vista, if it matters) and the answer was no: the host was smart enough to know that no more data can be received from the device, even though all the packets sent by the device were full (maximum size allowed on Endpoint 0). I'm wondering if there are any hosts that are not smart enough, and will try to perform another IN transaction and expect to receive a zero-length data packet.
I think I read the relevant parts of the USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 specifications from usb.org but I did not find this issue addressed. I would appreciate it if someone can point me to the right section in either of those documents.
I know that a zero-length packet can be necessary if the device chooses to send less data than the host requested in wLength.
I know that I could make my code flexible enough to handle either case, but I'm hoping I don't have to.
Thanks to anyone who can answer this question!
Read carefully USB specification:
The Data stage of a control transfer from an endpoint to the host is complete when the endpoint does one of
the following:
Has transferred exactly the amount of data specified during the Setup stage
Transfers a packet with a payload size less than wMaxPacketSize or transfers a zero-length packet
So, in your case, when wLength == transfer size, answer is NO, you don't need ZLP.
In case wLength > transfer size, and (transfer size % ep0 size) == 0 answer is YES, you need ZLP.
In general, USB uses a less-than-max-length packet to demarcate an end-of-transfer. So in the case of a transfer which is an integer multiple of max-packet-length, a ZLP is used for demarcation.
You see this in bulk pipes a lot. For example, if you have a 4096 byte transfer, that will be broken down into an integer number of max-length packets plus one zero-length-packet. If the SW driver has a big enough receive buffer set up, higher-level SW receives the entire transfer at once, when the ZLP occurs.
Control transfers are a special case because they have the wLength field, so ZLP isn't strictly necessary.
But I'd strongly suggest SW be flexible to both, as you may see variations with different USB host silicon or low-level HCD drivers.
I would like to expand on MBR's answer. The USB specification 2.0, in section 5.5.3, says:
The Data stage of a control transfer from an endpoint to the host is
complete when the endpoint does one of the following:
Has transferred exactly the amount of data specified during the Setup stage
Transfers a packet with a payload size less than wMaxPacketSize or transfers a zero-length packet
When a Data stage is complete, the Host Controller advances to the
Status stage instead of continuing on with another data transaction.
If the Host Controller does not advance to the Status stage when the
Data stage is complete, the endpoint halts the pipe as was outlined in
Section 5.3.2. If a larger-than-expected data payload is received from
the endpoint, the IRP for the control transfer will be
aborted/retired.
I added emphasis to one of the sentences in that quote because it seems to specifically say what the device should do: it should "halt" the pipe if the host tries to continue the data phase after it was done, and it is done if all the requested data has been transmitted (i.e. the number of bytes transferred is greater than or equal to wLength). I think halting refers to sending a STALL packet.
In other words, the device does not need a zero-length packet in this situation and in fact the USB specification says it should not provide one.
You don't have to. (*)
The whole point of wLength is to tell the host the maximum number of bytes it should attempt to read (but it might read less !)
(*) I have seen devices that crash when IN/OUT requests were made at incorrect time during control transfers (when debugging our host solution). So any host doing what you are worried about, would of killed those devices and is hopefully not in the market.
Related
With a control PC, I am addressing a R&S ESPI Receiver device to perform a frequency scan and return the measurement results back via BAT-EMC control software and a NI GPIB-USB controller in between. My target is to track the binary measurement data (Definite Length Block Data according to IEEE 488.2) sent to the control PC to understand how the device is deciding on the byte size of each binary block sent.
The trace shows that binary blocks are sent with no consistent pattern or rule!
E.g, running the same scan with the same frequency range and step twice may result in a different distribution of the measurement values' bytes on binary blocks (and possibly different total number of blocks sent), although the amount of data delivered is the same.
Any help to figure out how the device and control software are communicating the measurement data?
PS: The NI trace at the level of GPIB controller is not showing that the control software is specifying a byte size when querying for the next block, neither is the instrument sending this piece of info when it is issuing a service request so that it is queried for more available data by the software (according to the trace).
Make sure that you are giving enough time for the instrument to respond. Possibly you are sending commands from the PC which would assert the ATN line and interrupt the response. You should be able to configure the instrument to send one result. Configure the instrument as a listener and talker and set the instrument to send only one response per trigger. Then send the group execute trigger (GET) and read the results off the bus. When it’s done measure how long it took for that packet to get sent. If you are sending triggers before the full response you will be terminating the output stream. I suspect this because the streams are randomly different.
I’m just starting to learn GPIB so please write back what happened.
I'm developing a USB device driver for a microcontroller (Atmel/Microchip SAMD21, but I think the question is a general one). I need multiple endpoints for control & data, and the USB hardware uses per-endpoint descriptors to (among other things) locate buffers for input and output data.
Since IN data is polled at the host's discretion it makes sense that each endpoint has its own IN buffer, so that any endpoint's data (if it has any to send) is immediately available when polled.
But as far as incoming data from SETUP & OUT transactions is concerned, it occurs to me that I can save memory by configuring all endpoints to use a shared buffer. It seems wasteful for each endpoint to have its own buffer when, given the nature of USB transactions, only one such transaction can occur at a time.
Obviously this approach requires that transaction interrupts are handled sufficiently quickly that the shared buffer is freed and prepared for a new transaction in time for whatever the next transaction might be - but this is already a requirement for the control endpoint, where some SETUP transactions are immediately followed by an OUT.
So, assuming the timing is feasible, is there any other reason why such an approach wouldn't work?
Probably not.
Normally, the USB module on a microcontroller handles OUT packets by keeping track of which packet buffers it has written data to, and it waits for your firmware to say it is done processing the buffer before accepting more data from the computer and overwriting the buffer. If an endpoint has no buffers available to receive more data, but the computer sends an OUT packet to the endpoint, the USB module typically responds to the computer with a NAK packet, which tells the computer it should retry later. In this situation, your firmware can take pretty much as long as it wants to handle the OUT packets.
By having multiple endpoints configured to use the same buffer, you mess up this system. When you receive an OUT packet on any of your endpoints, the USB module would (probably) not know that multiple endpoints use the same buffer, so it would not issue NAK packets on your other OUT endpoints. If it receives another OUT packet right away, it would write it to the same buffer, overwriting the previous packet. Therefore, whenever you receive a packet, your code would have to rush as fast as it can to do something like copying the data out of that buffer, disabling other OUT endpoints, or reassigning buffers.
Even if you can actually get this to work, it means that your scheme to save a little bit of memory turns the servicing of USB events into a real-time task (i.e. a task that requires responses from your code in a few microseconds). If you want to add another real-time task to your system later, it will be very difficult, because you always have to be ready to be interrupted by your USB-handling code.
The SAMD21 has tons of memory (32 KB) so you probably don't need to worry about optimizing this part of it.
I agree with David's Response. You didn't mention the speed of the device you are creating. A low-speed would need just a few 8-byte buffers. A full-speed, a few 64-byte buffers. High-speed, maybe eight 64-byte buffers, depending on your use. A super-speed device, your still only talking a few 512-byte buffers.
I would create a ring buffer for each endpoint. This way you are not moving data around. You are simply using a pointer that points to an entry within a memory ring. A full-speed device with a control endpoint, an interrupt endpoint, and two bulk endpoints, each endpoint having sixteen 64-byte entries per ring, is still only a total of 4k RAM, 1/8th of the total RAM.
However, I am not familiar with the SAMD21, so please check the specification to be sure this will work.
I've been experimenting with isochronous USB transfers using WinUsb, and it turns out that WinUsb always sends data as fast as possible:
WinUsb_WriteIsochPipe packetizes the transfer buffer so that in each interval, the host can send the maximum bytes allowed per interval.
However for the kernel drivers you can apparently send shorter packets:
The MaximumPacketSize value indicates the maximum permitted size of the isochronous packet. The client driver can set the size of each isochronous packet to any value less than the MaximumPacketSize value.
I wondered how USB audio handles this. As far as I can see in the spec they just two alternative configurations for the interface - a zero bandwidth one, and a non-zero bandwidth one. There is a flag that says whether the endpoint requires full-size packets or not.
So my questions are:
a) What is the best way to handle sending less than full-speed data. Should I have a whole array of alternate configurations with different max packet sizes?
b) Should I expect to be able to send shorter-than-maximum packets? If so why doesn't WinUsb allow this?
Maybe you have to call WinUsb_WriteIsochPipe once for each packet you want to send. Make sure to use asynchronous I/O so you can queue up dozens or hundreds of requests ahead of time.
Digging around with/for HID reports, I ran into a strange problem within a USB HID device. I'm implementing an HID class device and have based my program on the HID USB program supplied by Keil. Some codes have been changed in this project and it seems working fine with 32 bytes input and 32 bytes output reports. Somehow, after thousands times data transferring, the Endpoint 1 out would hang and become a bad pipe. Then I searched the google for some tips, a topic remind me that we should write a data length zero packet after sending a length of packet match what you defined in the report description. But it's not working for me. Then I write a data length zero to the control pipe after I receive a out packet and magically, it works! It would never hang after million times transferring!
Here is my question: Why does it works after writing a data length zero to a control pipe. The data transferring in the out pipe should have no relationship with the data in the control pipe. It confuses me!
If you transfer any data that is less than the expected payload size, you must send a Zero Length Packet to indicate that data has transferred.
But it depends heavily on the implementation on the host controller, and not all devices follow the specification to the point and may stall.
Source:
When do USB Hosts require a zero-length IN packet at the end of a Control Read Transfer?
I have to send file byte-by-byte to serially connected AT89s52 from computer (VB.NET).
Every sended byte have some job to do in microcontroller what require some time.
Here is relevant part of my C code to receiving bytes:
SCON = 0x50;
TMOD = 0x20; // timer 1, mode 2, 8-bit reload
TH1 = 0xFD; // reload value for 9600 baud
TR1 = 1;
TI = 1;
again:
while(RI!=0)
{
P1=SBUF; // show data on led's
RI=0;
receivedBytes++;
}
if (key1==0)
{
goto exitreceive; // break receiving
}
show_lcd_received_bytes(receivedBytes);
// here is one more loop
// with different duration for every byte
goto again;
And here is VB.NET code for sending bytes:
For a As Integer = 1 To 10
For t As Integer = 0 To 255
SerialPort1.Write(Chr(t))
Next t
Next a
Problem is that mC have some job to do after every received byte and VB.NET don't know for that and send bytes too fast so in mC finishes just a part of all bytes (about 10%).
I can incorporate "Sleep(20)" in VB loop ant then thing will work but I have many of wasted time because every byte need different time to process and that would be unacceptable slow communication.
Now, my question is if 8051 can set some busy status on UART which VB can read before sending to decide to send byte or not.
Or how otherwise to setup such communication as described?
I also try to receive bytes with serial interrupt on mC side with same results.
Hardware is surely OK because I can send data to computer well (as expected).
Your problem is architectural. Don't try to do processing on the received data in the interrupt that handles byte Rx. Have your byte Rx interrupt only copy the received byte to a separate Rx data buffer, and have a background task that does the actual processing of the incoming data without blocking the Rx interrupt handler. If you can't keep up due to overall throughput issue, then RTS/CTS flow control is the appropriate mechanism. For example, when your Rx buffer gets 90% full, deassert the flow control signal to pause the transmit side.
As #TJD mentions hardware flow control can be used to stop the PC from sending characters while the microcomputer is processing received bytes. In the past I have implemented hardware flow by using an available port line as an output. The output needs to be connected to an TTL to RS-232 driver(if you are currently using a RS-232 you may have and extra driver available). If you are using a USB virtual serial port or RS-422/485 you will need to implement software flow control. Typically a control-S is sent to tell the PC to stop sending and a control-Q to continue. In order to take full advantage of flow control you most likely will need to also implement a fully interrupt driven FIFO to receive/send characters.
If you would like additional information concerning hardware flow control, check out http://electronics.stackexchange.com.
Blast from the past, I remember using break out boxes to serial line tracers debugging this kind of stuff.
With serial communication, if you have all the pins/wires utililzed then there is flow control via the RTS (Ready To Send) and DTR (Data Terminal Ready) that are used to signal when it is OK to send more data. Do you have control over that in the device you are coding via C? IN VB.NET, there are events used to receive these signals, or they can be queried using properties on the SerialPort object.
A lot of these answers are suggesting hardware flow control, but you also have the option of enhancing your transmission to be more robust by using software flow control. Currently, your communication is strong, but if you start running a higher baud rate or a longer distance or even just have a noisy connection, characters could be received that are incorrect, or characters could be dropped.
You could add a simple two-byte ACK sequence upon completion of whatever action is set to happen. It could look something like this:
Host sends command byte: <0x00>
Device echoes command byte: <0x00>
Device executes whatever action is needed
Device sends ACK/NAK byte (based on result):
This would allow you to see on the host side if communication is breaking down. The echoed character may mismatch what was sent which would alert you to an issue. Additionally, if a character is not received by the host within some timeout, the host can try retransmitting. Finally, the ACK/NAK gives you the option of returning a status, but most importantly it will let the host know that you've completed the operation and that it can send another command.
This can be extended to include a checksum to give the device a way to verify that the command received was valid (A simple logical inverse sent alongside the command byte would be sufficient).
The advantage to this solution is that it does not require extra lines or UART support on either end for hardware flow control.