From: Marcin Bukat <marcin.bukat_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 8 May 2012 09:52:49 +0200

2012/5/7 Jonas Wielicki <j.wielicki_at_sotecware.net>:
> Hi folks,
>
> (heh, I hope this won't be too long, but its essentially just a short
> question with a „bit“ of context)
>
> I'm still messing with ATA code to debug further SSD issues. Now I
> stumbled across what rockbox code does before command issuing. Basically
> its like this:
>
> (1) Select the device
> (2) wait_for_rdy
> (2a) wait_for_bsy (or return with error)
> (2a.i) wait until STATUS_BSY is cleared (or timeout)
> (2a) wait until STATUS_RDY is set (or timeout)
> (3) Setup parameters and issue the command
>
> (see firmware/ata.c, searching for ATA_SELECT for reference, its done at
> several places)
>
> However, ATA spec draft 5 (section 9.3, its at page 236 in the version I
> have) has the following state graph for the bus idle mode (i.e. before a
> command is being executed):

More versions of the standard can be found at
http://hddguru.com/documentation (including recent ones)

>
>
> Check_Status:
>    BSY = 0 & DRQ = 0 & wrong device selected
>      => Device_Select
>    BSY = 0 & DRQ = 0 & correct device selected
>      => Write_parameters
>    BSY = 1 or DRQ = 1
>      => Check_Status
> Device_Select:
>    Device selected
>      => Check_Status
> Write_parameters:
>    ... do command setup etc.
>
>
> So the spec makes no statement about the RDY bit in the status register,
> so we could be timing out here indefinetly under circumstances where the
> RDY bit has *not* been set before or am I getting something wrong here?

From this point of view this is correct. I mean state diagram for PIO
commands doesn't mention DRDY bit.
BUT section 5.14.5.2 of ATA/ATAPI-7 spec states that all devices not
implementing PACKET command feature set (aka CDROMs)
should set DRDY to 1 when device is capable of accepting commands.
Moreover it states that device should preserve DRDY state in idle and
standby modes.

Anyway I am by no means ATA expert so more experienced devs should
express their opinion here.

MB
Received on 2012-05-08