Preparing for new release of FC host tools

[Das Signal]

On Sat, Feb 29, 2020 at 03:15:41PM -0800, Mychaela Falconia wrote:

> Why did Das Signal not notice this problem on his Debian system with a
> 4.19-based kernel, i.e., why was he getting the same performance with
> the ASYNC_LOW_LATENCY libserial patch included or reverted?  The trick
> is that this ASYNC_LOW_LATENCY flag persists through closing and
> subsequent reopening of a given serial port (that is why one can make
> the setting with a command line tool and have it persist), and I
> suspect that DS had tried the version with the libserial hack included
> first, then tried the version with the patch reverted, but didn't
> realize that the ASYNC_LOW_LATENCY flag was still set.  To see the
> poor performance without this flag set, one would need to either
> remove and reinsert the USB-serial device or manually clear the flag
> with setserial, then run a version of loadtools without the libserial
> hack.

Hi Mychaela,

You are correct, I did not realize the low latency flag was persistent!
This explains why I saw no difference. Now I have only been using Debian 10
since fairly recently, before I was on Debian 9 which has kernel 4.9,
so I did not run into this problem like Serg did.

> Going forward, I am going to make a few more small fixes and then put
> out fc-host-tools-r12 as a checkpoint release.  I already have plans
> for a bigger change of implementing a binary protocol between loadtools
> and loadagent, a change which I expect will dramatically speed up all
> of our lengthy operations, but the current freecalypso-tools tree
> already has too many new developments which need to be put out in a
> release, hence my plan to make fc-host-tools-r12 as a checkpoint
> release and then almost immediately proceed to new developments with
> the binary protocol.

Excellent! Thank you again for your work :)

--DS