Trying to get Kfir board to run..

[Frank Neumann <franky@viona.de>]

Hi, dear author of the Kfir driver for Linux (Ralph?),

in my company we had pretty much the same board as depicted in
http://www.linuxtv.org/mpeg2/, and so I thought I'd give it a try. I got
the sources, compiled modules and inserted them (machine is a Pentium II-400,
128 MB Ram, runnig kernel 2.2.16 and Debian (pretty recent packages).

The board's PCI data is like the driver expects; lspci gives:

00:0a.0 Multimedia controller: Visiontech Ltd: Unknown device 8000 (rev 5e)

and /proc/pci has this entry:
Bus  0, device  10, function  0:
    Multimedia controller: Unknown vendor Unknown device (rev 94).
      Vendor id=141f. Device id=8000.
      Medium devsel.  Fast back-to-back capable.  IRQ 5.  Master Capable.  Latency=32.  Max Lat=32.
      Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xe0800000 [0xe0800000].
      I/O at 0xb000 [0xb001].
      Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xe0000000 [0xe0000000].
      Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0xdf800000 [0xdf800000].

Inserting all driver modules went fine:
franky@tux:/u1/src/kfir/driver> lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by
kfir                  216528   0
saa711x                 3344   0 (unused)
i2c-algo-bit            7664   1 [kfir]
i2c-core               10592   0 [kfir saa711x i2c-algo-bit]
videodev                2816   1 [kfir]
[...rest of modules omitted]

Loading the last one (kfir.o) gave the following debug messages:

root@tux:/u1/src/kfir/driver> insmod kfir.o
kfir: Kfir board revision 5e
loaded microcode with length 32385
kfir: GP_INPUT on
kfir: Reset Kfir and PLL ... done
kfir: adsp loading successful
kfir: ADSP initialization...done
kfir: segment: 0  Done
kfir: segment: 1  Done
kfir: segment: 2  Done
kfir: segment: 3  Done
kfir: segment: 4  Done
kfir: segment: 5  Done
kfir: Download parameters...kfir: done
saa711x: version=11
saa711x: attaching SAA711X at 0x4a
kfir: saa711x decoder attached
kfir: i2c attach [SAA711X]
i2c-core.o: client [SAA711X] registered to adapter [kfir #0](pos. 0).
saa711x: status=c0
saa711x: attached to adapter kfir #0
i2c-core.o: adapter kfir #0 registered as adapter 0.
kfir: Found i2c device at: 0x4a
kfir: decoder status=4

Ok, so after that I connected a simple video camera to the S-video connector,
turned it on and did the "cat /dev/video >bla.mpg", where /dev/video is
hopefully correct like this:

crw-r--r--    1 root     root      81,   0 Nov 27 11:53 /dev/video

Well, I got no "No such device" error message, so it must have been correct.
However, I do not get any output into the file at all. The driver says:

root@tux:/u3> cat /dev/video >bla.mpg
kfir: Download parameters...kfir: done
eready=00200001

After this, nothing happens. When I press Ctrl-C, it takes about 4 seconds
until the process is terminated (the machine load went up a bit during this
time), and then I see

eready=00200000

but the file (bla.mpg) is 0 bytes long. Do you have any explanations on what
could be going wrong here? I was told that "on this board the SAA711x gets its
clock not from a crystal, but from the microcode PLL, so the board might
not have been initialized correctly". Does that help you in any way?

Thanks for reading, and regards,
Frank

PS: I did not have any audio connected when testing, but I think this should
not produce such problems, right?
-- 
   Frank Neumann (franky@viona.de), Software Engineer @ VIONA Development GmbH
       Karlstraße 27, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany  - phone: +49 721 9134424