Commit Graph

157 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Roflin d6fb7c81b9 scripts: add a pcap analyser to find the BBA throughput limit
Swiss dumps a disc over the adapter at 740-780 KB/s, which is ~23% of the
27 Mbit/s EXI ceiling (3375 KB/s), and no published real-BBA figure exists to
compare against.  Rather than reason about where the rest goes, measure it.

./scripts/analyse-pcap.py /tmp/bba.pcap --gc-ip 10.0.0.64 reports, per
direction: throughput as a fraction of the EXI ceiling, MEAN FRAME SIZE,
retransmissions, the GC's advertised TCP window, zero-window spans, and the
largest gaps between data frames.  Each one discriminates a different
bottleneck:

  mean frame far below 1514  -> per-frame overhead (interrupts, EXI
                                transactions, socket bookkeeping) dominates
  retransmissions            -> we are dropping frames, e.g. the 15-page RX
                                ring overflowing (RBFI)
  small advertised window    -> capped at window/RTT regardless of the wire
  zero-window spans          -> the GC cannot drain: CPU/stack bound
  large gaps, little sending -> the limit is upstream of the wire entirely
                                (disc read, CPU, stack), not the adapter

Classic pcap only, stdlib only, no root.  pcapng is detected and refused with
a conversion hint rather than misparsed.

scripts/test-analyse-pcap.py synthesises captures with known properties and
checks each conclusion is reached: 1000 full frames in 2 s reports ~22% of the
ceiling, 200-byte payloads raise the overhead warning, a repeated seq counts 9
retransmissions, one 300 ms hole in 100 frames is found and attributed, a
zero-window span is called CPU/stack bound, and a pcapng header is rejected.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 15:21:47 +02:00
Roflin 0c5a7bf9db mini-dhcpd: stop reporting ARP as a corrupted frame
Swiss got a DHCP lease on hardware (10.0.0.64/24), but the script flagged
every ARP from the GC as "frame did NOT parse as DHCP ... this is what a
corrupted TX frame looks like".  That was wrong and actively misleading: the
frames are valid lwIP duplicate-address probes (sender 0.0.0.0, target =
the offered address), sent to check the lease is free before accepting it.

The parser conflated "not DHCP" with "corrupted".  A diagnostic that cries
wolf on normal traffic is worse than none, because 'malformed' then means
nothing.  Now:

  'info'      from the client but not DHCP -- ARP decoded properly (probe vs
              request vs reply, with addresses), other ethertypes named
  'malformed' CLAIMED IPv4/UDP->67 and then failed to parse, i.e. what a
              genuinely damaged TX frame would look like

So the corruption diagnostic still works -- that was the point of using a raw
socket -- but it only fires when it means something.

scripts/test-mini-dhcpd.py keeps the self-test, now including the exact
60-byte frame from the console (T6), a damaged DHCP packet that must still be
flagged (T7), and a raw ethertype (T8).

One note for anyone extending that test: the real frame goes in as ONE string
literal.  Splitting the hex across two adjacent literals is how the first
version of T6 silently lost a byte and blamed the parser for decoding the
target as 0.10.0.0 -- the parser was correct.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 15:07:44 +02:00
Roflin 29ce281a7f scripts: add a minimal raw-socket DHCP server for BBA bring-up
sudo ./scripts/mini-dhcpd.py enp0s31f6

Serves one address, logs every exchange, and does not touch the rest of the
system.  Needed because the Swiss DHCP timeout proves nothing while there is no
server on the segment to answer.

Deliberately AF_PACKET rather than a UDP socket on port 67.  A UDP socket only
sees frames the kernel accepts as well-formed IP/UDP, and one of the open
questions is whether the GC's frames arrive INTACT: libogc streams TX payload
with EXI_Dma and the GC's DMA-write engine is documented to have a 1-bit-shift
bug.  A corrupted DISCOVER would never reach a UDP socket and the server would
look "fine, just no client".  On a raw socket every frame from the adapter is
parsed by hand and anything that fails is reported as MALFORMED with the reason
and a hexdump -- which is exactly the evidence that would confirm or kill the
corruption hypothesis.

Replies go out as raw ethernet UNICAST to the client's MAC, so a successful
lease also demonstrates the new MACRAW MF filter accepts unicast to SHAR and
not just broadcast.

Self-tested without a network: a well-formed DISCOVER parses with the right
chaddr/xid, a corrupted magic cookie is reported as malformed rather than
ignored, frames from other MACs are skipped, and the generated OFFER is a valid
342-byte frame -- unicast to the client, correct IP checksum and total length,
ports 67->68, BOOTP padded to the 300-byte minimum, yiaddr as configured.
On-wire behaviour is NOT tested here; the devcontainer has only a veth.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 15:02:34 +02:00
Roflin 2893e7f6fb Filter RX to own-MAC + broadcast: unfiltered MACRAW hung Swiss
Compat TODO item 1.  S0_MR now sets the MACRAW MF bit, so the W5100 delivers
frames addressed to SHAR or broadcast only -- what the real BBA does, since
libogc2 configures NCRB = AB|CA|2_PACKETS_PER_INT (PR=0, PM=0, AB=1).
NCRB.PR (bit 0) clears MF if the GC asks for promiscuous, sampled when socket 0
is OPENed, so a later PR change applies on the next NCRA reset.

This was not a performance issue, it was a HANG.  Swiss sat on "Initialising
Network" forever.  libogc2's bba_interrupt() loops

  while (status) { clear IR; start_rx; status = IR & IMR; }

which only exits when IR & IMR reaches zero.  Unfiltered, every frame on the
segment set RI, re-asserting faster than the loop could clear it, so it never
exited.  Unplugging the ethernet cable let Swiss run all the way through and
then fail DHCP for want of a server -- a one-minute experiment that identified
it after a lot of theorising about descriptors and interrupts.

Filtering against SHAR turned out to be safe for this path after all.  The
earlier worry was that MF filters on SHAR, which we write only at init, so a
driver WRITING PAR0-5 would leave it stale and MF would drop everything.
libogc2 READS the MAC out of PAR0-5 instead, so SHAR -- written from reg.par in
that same init -- cannot go stale underneath it.  Broadcast still passes MF and
a DHCP OFFER unicast to our MAC passes too.

Left open and recorded: refreshing SHAR on a PAR0-5 write plus a socket
re-open, for a driver that does write it (the official SDK driver is unread).
The W5500 back-end is unchanged, being the unused alternate path; it would need
the same Sn_MR treatment if revived.

T1 expects S0_MR = MACRAW|MF in the init sequence, T1b checks promisc high
re-inits with MF clear.  Mutation-tested: never setting MF fails both.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 14:51:17 +02:00
Roflin 90a583dd46 Remove the device-ID one-shot: it made Swiss see no adapter at all
id_phase was set at reset and cleared permanently by the GC's first NCRA reset,
after which a command-space read of register 0 returned 0x00000000.  Swiss
calls EXI_GetID from bba_exists() AND again from bba_requires_init(), long
after init, and matches the result against EXI_MX98730EC_ID -- so with the
one-shot spent no case matched and Swiss reported NO ADAPTER, not a broken one.
Running gc_bba_test was enough to spend it, so the adapter would "disappear"
after any test session.

The justification in the comment was wrong.  It claimed the fast path would
otherwise hijack address 0 so the GC could never read NCRA back -- but NCRA is
REGISTER space (0x80/0xC0 header) while the fast path requires byte 0 == 0x00,
i.e. COMMAND space.  They were never ambiguous, and no driver reads command
register 0 for anything else (libogc2 reads 0x01/0x03/0x0B/0x0F, Swiss 0x03).
Real hardware answers EXI_GetID whenever asked; that is how EXI enumerates
devices.

id_arm is now tied high, and the id_phase output, the FFSynchronizer that
crossed it into the pin domain, and the BBATop wiring are all gone.  The port
stays only so the PHASE_METER build can disarm the fast path, which would
otherwise send ID bytes instead of its constant 0x80.

bba_top T1b reads the device ID AFTER an NCRA reset, which T1 (before any
reset) structurally cannot catch.  Mutation-tested: disarming the fast path
returns 00 00 00 00 for both, exactly what Swiss saw.

gc_bba_test: the ID tests no longer skip.  A wrong ID is a FAILURE again, with
no iface_alive() discrimination and no ordering requirement between suites --
the ID is readable at any point in a run.  g_ncra_reset_done and iface_alive()
are removed outright rather than left as a dead flag.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 14:33:12 +02:00
Roflin 991342c0b5 docs: geom_honoured is asserted but not wired anywhere yet
The ring-geometry note claimed a rejected BP/RHBP is "observable rather than
silent".  That is overstated: geom_honoured exists on RXFrameAssembler and the
tests check it, but BBATop wires it to nothing -- no status register, no LED,
no UART line -- so a rejected geometry is silent to both the GC and the bench.
Recorded as a loose end; the guarantee today is "rejected rather than obeyed",
not "reported".

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 14:24:53 +02:00
Roflin 052e1a4252 gc_bba_test: shorten the driver-shapes suite description to fit the row
"Swiss + libogc init sequences and transfer shapes" is 49 characters and
wrapped by exactly one.  The menu row is 28 columns of prefix --
"  " + name(%-14s) + "  " + "pp/ff/kk" + "  " -- and the console is 76 wide
(console_init starts at x=20 on a 640-pixel framebuffer at 8 pixels per
character), leaving 48.

Now "Swiss + libogc init and transfer shapes", 39 characters, in line with the
41 of the longest original.  Added a comment above g_suites with the 48-column
budget and where it comes from, so the next suite does not rediscover it by
wrapping on a console.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 14:22:42 +02:00
Roflin 6b2e6724a2 Fix the 0/8 timing failure the ring-geometry change caused
The sweep after honouring BP/RHBP came back clk 16.5-17.6 MHz, 0/8 seeds
passing against the 24 MHz target -- from ~29 MHz before.  The build was
unusable.

Cause: the sanitised bounds were combinational, so

  bp/rhbp -> comparators -> Mux -> subtract -> pg_total -> add -> raw
          -> compare -> free -> compare -> have_room

became ONE path where it had been constant-folded.  Two fixes were needed, and
the first alone was not enough:

1. Register pg_first/pg_last/pg_total and rrp_s.  They change only when the GC
   writes BP/RHBP/RRP, so a cycle of staleness costs nothing, and `free`
   already reaches the FSM through the registered have_room.  This got it to
   ~20 MHz, still failing.
2. Narrow them from 8 bits to 4.  Ring pages are 1-15.  An 8-bit variable-vs-
   variable comparison is a carry chain where variable-vs-CONSTANT folds into
   a couple of LUTs -- precisely what making the bounds dynamic had thrown
   away.  geom_ok guarantees bp < rhbp <= 0x0F, which makes the narrow slice
   safe.

Now 26.90 and 28.50 MHz on seeds 1-2, against 28.00/29.21 for the build
without the geometry change.

Attribution needed an A/B: the register-space decode (item 4) landed in the
same stretch and had never been swept on its own.  Measured separately it
closes 28.0-29.2 MHz and costs nothing, so the whole regression was the
assembler.  The critical-path report named rx_frame_assembler.py:215 -- the
rrp clamp -- which is what pointed at the comparator width rather than at the
arithmetic everyone would suspect first.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 14:16:43 +02:00
Roflin 147ef8fcfc Honour the GC's ring geometry (BP / RHBP) instead of hardcoding it
Compat TODO item 2, the last silent-corruption risk.  RXFrameAssembler took
the RX ring as a compile-time constant (pages 1-15), so a driver configuring a
SMALLER ring was ignored and we kept writing pages it would never read, with
nothing reporting an error.  The bounds now come from bp/rhbp, wired in BBATop
from the GC's BP (0x0A/0B) and RHBP (0x1A/1B) registers, and both the page wrap
and the free-space calculation use them.

Garbage is rejected rather than obeyed: the driver's values are used only when
bp >= 1 (page 0 is the TX buffer), rhbp <= 0x0F and rhbp > bp.  Otherwise the
hardcoded layout stands and geom_honoured goes low, so a mismatch is
observable.  Without that check BP=0 or an RHBP below BP gives a zero or
negative ring size and the assembler writes outside it.

⚠️ Recorded as a known limitation: a ring must be LARGER than
_MAX_FRAME_PAGES (6) or nothing is ever stored, because a frame's length is
unknown until EOF so the worst case (1518+4 = 6 pages) is reserved up front.
Found the honest way -- the test was written with RHBP=4 first and passed
VACUOUSLY, storing nothing at all.  Making that work needs a length-aware
reservation, which is a bigger change than this one.

T7 (8-page ring honoured, frames only in pages 1-8, and at least one actually
stored) and T7b (all three garbage cases rejected, fallback still stores).
Mutation-tested: wrapping at the hardcoded page 15 writes pages 9-11 and fails
T7; removing the sanity check fails all four T7b assertions.

Item 1 (RX filtering) remains the only open gap.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 14:06:04 +02:00
Roflin 4a455bbe88 Decode NCRB and the registers with non-zero hardware defaults
Compat TODO items 3 and 4.  Every register libogc2 writes now stores writes and
reads back, with the documented hardware reset defaults: NCRB (0x01), BP
(0x0A/0B), TLBP (0x0C/0D), RXINTT (0x14/15), RHBP (0x1A/1B), NWAYC (0x30,
default 0x84), GCA (0x32), MISC (0x3D, default 0x3C), MISC2 (0x50).  BP and
RHBP reset to OUR layout (page 1, page 15) so a driver reading them back
without writing sees something consistent with where the ring actually is.

Previously all of these read 0x00 and dropped writes, so a driver doing
read-modify-write or sanity-checking a default saw zero -- and libogc2 does
read NWAYC before writing it.

Deliberately still reading 0x00: LTPS, LRPS, TWP, TRP, TXFIFOCNT.  Those are
STATUS registers, not configuration, so storing what was written to them would
be a lie rather than a default.  Drivers read LRPS/LTPS only on error bits and
0x00 reads as "no error", which is truthful for a device that does not detect
them.

NCRB, BP and RHBP are also exported as BBARegisterFile.ncrb/.bp/.rhbp for the
RX-filtering work (item 1) and the ring-geometry check (item 2).  Nothing
consumes them yet -- the decode lands first so the behaviour that uses it is a
separate, testable change.

T15 checks the defaults, replays libogc2's twelve init writes in its order and
reads every one back, and asserts the NCRB export is 0x52 with PR=0, PM=0,
AB=1 -- i.e. that the real BBA delivers own-MAC + broadcast only, which is the
fact item 1 has to act on.  Mutation-tested: dropping NWAYC's 0x84 default
fails it, as does dropping NCRB writes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 14:02:28 +02:00
Roflin e10849f73d docs: track the BBA compatibility gaps as TODOs
Records the differences between this implementation and what real GC software
expects, with the evidence and the driver source for each, so they are worked
through rather than rediscovered.  Open items: no hardware RX filtering,
hardcoded ring geometry, NCRB undecoded, and registers that read 0x00 where
real hardware has non-zero defaults.  Also records what is deliberately NOT to
be implemented (the device-initiated challenge/response) and that two of our
registers (TWD, HIPR) do not exist on real hardware.

Notes explicitly that games use the official Nintendo SDK driver, which none of
the three readable drivers is, so "no open driver does this" is weaker evidence
than "the hardware has no such register".

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 11:40:55 +02:00
Roflin 530d58df4f Record the measured timing cost of the command register file
A/B on identical seeds rather than comparing against a different sweep, since
seed-to-seed spread on this design is larger than the effect being measured:

              seed 1 clk   seed 2 clk   SB_DFFE   SB_LUT4
  before        28.72        27.04         934      2818
  after         29.07        26.39        1038      2959

So +104 FFs, +141 LUTs, and about -2.4% fmax on the worst seed while seed 1
improved -- most of the spread is placement noise over a modest real cost.
8/8 seeds still close; best seed 3 at 29.74 MHz is 1.24x over the 24 MHz
target.

Also records why the storage covers the full low nibble rather than only the
registers libogc2 touches: a sparse decode would silently drop writes to
anything unlisted, which is exactly the behaviour this replaced.  Noted as the
obvious thing to narrow if clk margin ever needs reclaiming.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 11:30:50 +02:00
Roflin 7116bc1ecc Implement the command registers libogc2 actually touches
Previously every command register except 0x02/0x03 read 0x00 and dropped
writes.  Real software will hit them, so they are now implemented, enumerated
from libogc2's gcif.c rather than guessed at random (Swiss's patch driver
touches only 0x02 and 0x03):

  0x01  read            revision ID -> priv->revid
  0x02  write           interrupt mask (IRMASKALL / IRMASKNONE)
  0x03  read / w1c      interrupt status
  0x04  write 2 bytes   priv->devid  = 0xD107
  0x05  write           priv->acstart = 0x4E
  0x08  read 4 bytes    challenge      | device-initiated path,
  0x09  write 4 bytes   response       | gated on status bit 0x10
  0x0B  read            challenge/response status
  0x0F  read (slow)     in __bba_reset(), result DISCARDED

0x01 returns 0x00 and is read-only.  That is a real-hardware value, not a
guess: the BBA never received a functional firmware revision that incremented
it.  libogc2's priv->revid = 0xf0 is its PRE-INIT PLACEHOLDER, overwritten by
whatever this read returns, so it must not be mistaken for the device value.
revid/devid/acstart feed only bba_calc_response(), whose path is
device-initiated, so they are functionally inert for us.

0x04 and up are plain read/write storage, which IS a guess: both drivers treat
them as write-only and never read them back, so read-what-you-wrote is the
least surprising behaviour and lets our tests confirm the write landed.
Ignoring them (the old behaviour) is strictly worse -- the write vanished.
Registers above 0x0F still read 0x00 so a stray high register cannot alias onto
a real one.

Noted for later: bba_cmd_in8_slow(0x0F) sits in __bba_reset() between two 10 ms
delays, holds CS for 200 us and discards the result.  A read whose value is
thrown away but whose timing is deliberate looks like a reset strobe; we treat
it as an ordinary register, and the NCRA reset follows immediately in that
sequence, so ignoring the side effect costs nothing today.

T14 covers the whole table and is mutation-tested: making 0x01 plain storage
fails it, and dropping the 0x04+ writes fails it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 11:24:23 +02:00
Roflin 49d7e8fcff Correct the framing: the two command forms are padding, not protocols
My earlier note read as "Swiss's menu and a patched game speak different
protocols to the same chip", which is both suspicious-sounding and wrong.

Both send the IDENTICAL 2-byte header [0x40|reg, 0x00] and differ only in how
many bytes follow, which the device never cared about -- the data phase runs
until CS, exactly as in register space.  Swiss's 4-byte form is an EXI
efficiency choice: one exi_imm_read_write(..., 4) is a single EXI immediate
operation, where libogc2 spends two separate EXI_ImmEx calls.  For code
injected into a running game, halving the EXI operations per register access is
worth a padding byte.

Menu vs game is not a protocol split either, just which library is linked:
cube/swiss/source/bba.c contains no BBA register access at all -- its header
exposes only network config, detection and display over <network.h> -- so the
menu is entirely libogc2, and the patch driver is Swiss's own leaner code.
Verified: the only menu-side device access is EXI_GetID for detection and
MX98730EC_GetExiSpeed, which just returns EXI_SPEED32MHZ (confirming Swiss
hardcodes speed index 5 for the real BBA), while bba_requires_init() returns
id != EXI_MX98730EC_ID, i.e. the real BBA needs no Swiss-side init.

Also sharpens the multi-byte caveat.  No single rule satisfies both Swiss's
padded single-byte write and libogc2's bba_cmd_outs(0x04, &devid, 2), so the
real device's behaviour there cannot be deduced from the drivers -- and it is
unobservable in them anyway: devid is the hardcoded constant 0xD107, is never
read back, and bba_cmd_out8(0x05, acstart) on the next line overwrites half of
it under auto-increment.  Settling it would need a real BBA on a logic
analyser, so the note now says not to try it from source.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 11:18:09 +02:00
Roflin 0d100eb84f Implement the COMMAND-level interrupt: without it no driver sees a frame
The BBA has two interrupt levels and we implemented only one.  Both drivers'
handlers are identical in shape -- libogc2's bba_event_handler and Swiss's
exi_coroutine:

  status = bba_cmd_in8(0x03);            /* COMMAND level */
  bba_cmd_out8(0x02, BBA_CMD_IRMASKALL);
  if (status & 0x80) bba_interrupt();    /* ONLY then the MAC level */

and bba_interrupt() is what reads register-space IR/IMR and calls
bba_start_rx().  Bit 7 of command register 0x03 means "a MAC interrupt is
pending".  r_cmd_ir was write-1-clear with nothing ever setting it, so a
command read of 0x03 returned 0x00, every branch of both handlers fell through,
and NEITHER DRIVER WOULD EVER HAVE PROCESSED A RECEIVED FRAME.

Our own tooling could not have caught it: gc_bba_test and netboot poll RWP/IR
directly and never use the interrupt path, so the whole command-level mechanism
was untested and unused.  Green suite, dead interface.

cmd_ir[7] is now a live level equal to (IR & IMR) != 0, and INT_N is
(cmd_ir & cmd_imr) != 0.  A level rather than a latch because both drivers
clear the MAC IR inside bba_interrupt() and only then write-1-clear command
0x03: a latched bit would be cleared by that write even if a new frame had
arrived in between, while a level stays asserted as long as the condition does.
INT_N honouring the command-level mask is what stops the line re-asserting
while a handler runs (IRMASKALL on entry, IRMASKNONE on exit).  r_cmd_imr
resets to 0xF8 since the real power-on value is unknown and both drivers set it
explicitly first thing.

T13 and T13b cover it, both mutation-tested: reading the latched bits only
leaves 0x00 after an RI, and ignoring the command mask leaves INT_N asserted
through IRMASKALL.

Also records in CLAUDE.md which driver actually talks to us, since Swiss has
several back-ends and it is easy to read the wrong one: cube/patches/bba/ has
one file per chip (bba.c is ours; enc28j60.c, w5500.c, w6100.c, w6300.c are
other adapters), Swiss's menu networking goes through libogc2's gcif.c, and
cube/patches/bba/bba.c is the in-game patch driver.  Detection is by EXI device
ID, so returning 04 02 02 00 is what gets us handed to the BBA path at all.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 11:11:55 +02:00
Roflin 88d05988b5 Document that the command decoder is one mechanism, and its real limit
Records why supporting both command-space forms is a single decoder rather
than two paths, and where that abstraction genuinely stops.

The unification: Swiss's "4-byte transfer" is not a second protocol.  From the
device's side it is the same 2-byte header followed by a data phase that
happens to be 2 bytes (00, val) instead of 1 (val).  Command space was the last
place still assuming a fixed transfer length, which register space already
avoids.  Both rules are length-agnostic -- last data byte wins, fill the first
two data slots -- so there is no driver detection, no mode flag, and with
comments stripped the words "Swiss" and "libogc" do not appear in the RTL.

The limit, which is real but inert: a 2-byte data phase means "pad + value"
(Swiss) or "two consecutive registers" (libogc2), and those cannot be told
apart on the wire.  libogc2 does do multi-byte command writes --
bba_cmd_outs(0x04, &priv->devid, 2) runs unconditionally in its init -- so last
byte wins is wrong for those and auto-increment is wrong for Swiss.  It does
not matter today because the only command registers implemented are 0x02 (IMR)
and 0x03 (IR), which both drivers access one byte at a time, while libogc2's
multi-byte accesses target 0x04/0x05 and 0x08/0x09, none of which are decoded.
If 0x04/0x05 are ever implemented the fix is per-register width knowledge, not
a driver mode -- noted so nobody resolves it by sniffing transfer length.

Also records that the challenge/response handshake must NOT be implemented:
libogc2 reads a 4-byte challenge from command reg 0x08 and writes the response
to 0x09, but only when the DEVICE raises status bit 0x10 in command reg 0x03.
It is device-initiated, we never set that bit, so the path cannot be entered.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 11:04:02 +02:00
Roflin b3685237b2 Support BOTH command-space forms: Swiss's 4-byte and libogc's 2-byte
Reading Swiss's own driver (cube/patches/bba/bba.c) shows the previous commit
fixed libogc and BROKE Swiss.  The two disagree, and both are real:

  Swiss   bba_cmd_out8: exi_imm_read_write(0x40<<24 | reg<<24 | val, 4)
          -> ONE 4-byte transfer [0x40|reg, 00, 00, val], and bba_cmd_in8
             returns the LOW byte, so a read response must be in BYTE 3.
  libogc2 bba_cmd_outsnosel: req = (reg<<8)|0x4000;
          EXI_ImmEx(&req, 2, WRITE); EXI_ImmEx(val, len, WRITE)
          -> THREE bytes, value in byte 2, and a read takes byte 2.
  stock libogc: identical to libogc2 (read out of libbba.a).

They share bytes 0 and 1 and differ only in how many bytes follow, so one
decoder serves both: take the LAST data byte before CS rise as the write value
(Swiss sends [00, val], libogc sends [val] -- last is val either way), and push
a read response TWICE so bytes 2 and 3 both carry it.  Swiss clocks 4 bytes and
pops both; libogc clocks 3 and leaves one, which the next transaction's header
pops drain -- a 2-byte header gives exactly one drain slot, so the leftover is
bounded at one and cannot accumulate.

Critically this means NO auto-increment of cmd_reg across the data phase: that
applied Swiss's padding 00 to the register and val to reg+1, which is precisely
how the libogc-only version broke Swiss.

T12 covers the Swiss form and asserts bytes 2 AND 3; T10 keeps the libogc form.
Both mutation-tested: re-adding the auto-increment fails T12 with 0x00 in both
slots, and pushing the response once fails T12's byte 3.  gc_bba_test gains
"cmd-space Swiss" alongside "cmd-space write", with bba_cmd_write4/read4.

Also corrects two things in CLAUDE.md now checkable against three drivers:
- NO driver writes TWD -- not Swiss, not libogc, not libogc2.  The "GC sets
  TWD before streaming" note was self-confirming: t_tx writes TWD because we
  wrote t_tx.  The counted TXDATA length is the primary path, not a fallback.
- Swiss's exi_dma_write rounds the length UP to 32 bytes (OSRoundUp32B), so
  TXDATA gets up to 31 trailing bytes past the frame and a counted length sends
  that much extra.  Real hardware must do the same since Swiss works on it;
  trailing padding past the IP total length is ignored.  A 1514-byte frame
  rounds to 1536 though, over the 1518 maximum.

Both drivers trigger TX with NCRA ST1, which the existing any-ST test accepts.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 11:01:33 +02:00
Roflin 71ec6a2b37 TX: count the TXDATA bytes, because libogc never writes TWD
Third contract checked against libogc rather than our notes.  __bba_link_tx is
four transactions -- read NWAYS, ONE register-space write of the whole frame to
0x0048, read NCRA, write NCRA = 0x04 -- with no TWD_LO/TWD_HI anywhere.  So the
device has to count the bytes it was handed.

The NCRA ST fallback queued tx_frame_len, which only TWD sets, so any driver
that skips TWD would have transmitted a stale or zero length.  BBARegisterFile
now keeps txdata_cnt, incremented per byte accepted at 0x0048 and cleared
whenever a frame is queued from either path, and the ST path queues that.

T11 drives TX in libogc's shape with no TWD write and checks both the queued
length and the drained bytes.  Mutation-tested: switching the ST path back to
tx_frame_len queues length 0, which is exactly the bug.  gc_bba_test gains the
hardware counterpart, "TX without TWD", which deliberately omits the TWD writes
that t_tx makes.

The TWD path stays and is still preferred when present: writing the length
before streaming is what lets TXFrameDrain consume concurrently and keeps
tx_bytes a rate-matching buffer rather than whole-frame storage.  Swiss writes
TWD, libogc does not, so both are supported.

Also recorded: libogc streams the payload with EXI_Dma (32-byte-aligned bulk
after PPCDCacheStoreAsync, then EXI_ImmEx for the remainder).  CLAUDE.md said
EXI DMA writes are avoided for the GC's 1-bit-shift bug; that is true of Swiss,
not libogc.  Nothing in the gateware changes -- a DMA write is just bytes
clocked in -- but the path will be exercised, and if that bug is real it
appears as corrupted TX frames that are not fixable here.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 10:49:11 +02:00
Roflin 0aa1fa884a Fix command-space writes, and replay libogc's real init sequence
Second protocol mismatch found the same way as the descriptor: by
disassembling libogc's own driver instead of trusting our notes.

COMMAND SPACE IS A 2-BYTE HEADER + DATA PHASE, not a single 4-byte transfer.
CLAUDE.md said [0x40|reg, 00, 00, data] and the decoder followed it, waiting
for a fourth byte and consuming the DATA byte as header byte 2 -- so every
command-space WRITE was silently dropped.  libogc's __bba_init writes command
register 2 (its interrupt mask) at both the start and the end of init, so none
of that took effect.  What it actually sends:

  EXI_Imm  (len=2, write) -> 42 00    the whole header, 0x4000 | (reg << 8)
  EXI_Sync
  EXI_ImmEx(len=1, write) -> 00       the data

Three bytes between CS fall and CS rise.  The device-ID read survived the wrong
decode only because SPIMode3Slave answers it on a fast path independent of this
FSM -- which is precisely why no test caught it: the only command-space traffic
under test bypassed the decoder being tested.

CHDR_2/CHDR_3 are replaced by CMD_WRITE, which takes the data byte straight
after header byte 1 and auto-increments the command register so a multi-byte
command write behaves like the register-space path.  cmd_wreg latches the
target because the write applies a cycle later, by which time cmd_reg has
moved on.  bba_register_file T10 writes command register 2 and reads it back,
and is mutation-tested: restoring the 4-byte decode fails it.

Also replaces the GUESSED init sequence in CLAUDE.md with the real transaction
list.  The old one was wrong in three ways that matter: libogc READS the MAC
out of PAR0-5 rather than writing one (so our reset value is what the console
uses), IMR is 0xDF not 0x86, and it writes RWP (0x0016/17) and RHBP (0x001A/1B)
which the register file does not accept.  The latter is harmless today -- RHBP
is 0x000F, matching our hardcoded 15-page ring -- but a driver configuring a
smaller ring would be ignored while the assembler kept writing outside it.

New gc_bba_test suite 7 "libogc init" replays the sequence on hardware:
cmd-space write (2-byte header, read back), MAC readable (one 6-byte PAR read,
Nintendo OUI), and init replay (all 30 writes in order, then NWAYS/HIPR/NCRA.SR
must still read correctly -- the old guessed header format turned a NWAYS read
into an NCRA reset, so a misdecoded write is a real risk).

bba.c gains bba_cmd_write/bba_cmd_read in libogc's shape.

Every module testbench and bba_top at EXI_HALF=1/2/8 pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 10:42:17 +02:00
Roflin d83f7beef8 Fix the RX ring descriptor to the format libogc actually parses
The assembler wrote 00 00 len[11:8] len[7:0] with bytes 0 and 1 zero.  The real
format, read out of libogc's own BBA driver, is a PACKED 32-BIT LITTLE-ENDIAN
word: next_packet_ptr in bits 0-11, packet_len in bits 12-23, status in bits
24-31.  Under that driver our descriptor for a 342-byte frame decoded as a
12-byte frame with a next-pointer of 0 into the reserved page, so Swiss and
anything else built on libogc would have initialised perfectly and then
misparsed every received frame.

Found by disassembling /opt/devkitpro/libogc/lib/cube/libbba.a (gcif.o,
bba_interrupt) rather than by guessing:

  lwbrx   r9,0,r9              # 4 bytes as a little-endian word
  rlwinm  r4,r9,20,20,31       # packet_len = (word >> 12) & 0xFFF
  addi    r4,r4,-4             # payload = packet_len - 4
  cmpwi   r4,1540
  srwi    r9,r9,24             # status = word >> 24
  and.    r9,r9,r18            # r18 = 0x..84 -> errors are 0x80 | 0x04

and the low 12 bits are written straight back to RRP (0x0018/0x0019), which is
why next_packet_ptr has to be there at all -- it is the driver's read pointer.

The length semantics and addressing were already correct (descriptor at
page<<8, body at +4, length including the descriptor); only the packing was
wrong and next_packet_ptr was never written.

RXFrameAssembler now computes the next page BEFORE writing the descriptor
(CALC_NEXT, formerly ADVANCE_RWP, moved ahead of the backfill) and writes bytes
0-3 as WRITE_D0..WRITE_D3.

WRITE_D3 fixes a latent bug this exposed: WRITE_PLACEHOLDER issues four writes
but the first lands twice, so desc_base+3 was NEVER written.  That was harmless
while the length write covered byte 3.  As the status byte it would have been
whatever the previous frame left in that cell, and a stale 0x80 or 0x04 makes
the driver discard the frame.

Readers updated to decode identically: netboot (which also now takes RRP from
the descriptor's own next_packet_ptr, as libogc does, instead of recomputing
the page span) and t_dma, including its page map.  netboot's +0/+1 offset probe
is removed -- the underrun that shifted descriptors is fixed and confirmed on
console, and under a packed format a +1 read is not a shifted descriptor but
garbage.

The assembler's testbench now decodes with libogc_decode(), reproducing the
instruction sequence above, so the tests check the DRIVER'S algorithm rather
than our own packing.  Every module testbench and bba_top at EXI_HALF=1/2/8
pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 10:27:45 +02:00
Roflin 5ee1b9d07b gc_bba_test: tell a spent id_phase from a real fault using the hardware
The ID tests guarded on g_ncra_reset_done, which is software state standing in
for hardware state.  The two come apart exactly when a build is delivered over
the wire: netboot replaces the DOL and restarts the app with the flag clear,
while the FPGA keeps running with id_phase already spent by the previous run.
The app then queries address 0, gets NCRA back -- correct behaviour -- and
reported a FAILURE for it.  That is why the ID tests would sometimes skip and
sometimes fail for the same expected condition.

Both tests now ask the hardware instead.  HIPR and NWAYS are hardwired
constants in the register file and do not depend on id_phase, so if both read
correctly the EXI path is demonstrably fine and a wrong answer at address 0 can
only be a spent id_phase -> SKIP, with "reflash FPGA" in the message.  If they
are wrong too, something real is broken and the test still FAILS.

The flag is kept only as a fast path for a reset issued during the same run,
with a comment saying it can be stale.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 10:17:41 +02:00
Roflin 2b0cbdd809 gc_bba_test: free the RX ring before waiting for a frame
t_rx reported "no frame in 2 s (RWP still 0x000F)" on a healthy adapter after
the Ethernet suite had been run a few times.  Page 15 is the giveaway: the app
never writes RRP, so ambient broadcast traffic fills the 15-page ring until
free = (1 + 15 - 15) mod 15 = 1, below _MAX_FRAME_PAGES (6).  RBFI then drops
every frame -- correctly, that is what it is for -- RWP stops advancing
permanently, and a test that waits for RWP to move can never pass again for the
rest of the session.

t_rx now catches RRP up to RWP before waiting, declaring what is already in the
ring consumed.  That is what a real driver does once it has read the frames out
and what netboot already does at start-up.  It also leaves exactly the newly
received frame unconsumed at RRP, which is where the SPRAM/DMA suite reads, so
t_dma still has something to parse.

No gateware change: the drop behaviour was correct and the bug was in the test
app's failure to consume.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 10:14:19 +02:00
Roflin e20b34b5e9 gc_bba_test: report where ring frames actually are when t_dma fails
t_dma said "p1 len 0x0002 implausible (RWP=11)", which names the symptom but
not the cause: a length alone cannot distinguish an unwritten descriptor from a
shifted read from a frame written at a page other than the one RRP points at.

On failure it now walks all 15 ring pages, classifies each descriptor ('-'
all-zero/never written, 'o' plausible length, 'x' non-zero but implausible,
'?' read failed) and prints that map plus the 4 raw descriptor bytes at the RRP
page.  One run then shows which of those it is.

Diagnostic only; no change to the pass/fail criterion or to any gateware.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 10:09:27 +02:00
Roflin abab26232b Fix the +1 descriptor offset: drop the arbiter's response register
SPRAMArbiter latched the SPRAM word into rsp_buf and raised exi_rsp_valid a
cycle later.  BBARegisterFile already took the response the cycle it arrived,
so the buffer bought nothing and cost a 24 MHz cycle (~42 ns) inside a deadline
that was short by about that much.  Both are now combinational in the cycle
SPRAM's output is valid.  The data sampling is unchanged -- the old code read
spram_dout in that same cycle, it just registered it before handing it over --
so only the handoff moved.

bba_top T9 goes from 1/6 to 6/6 byte-exact at EXI_HALF=1, and stays 6/6 at 2
and 8.  The whole suite passes at the hardware rate.  Nothing else changed:
BBARegisterFile is untouched.

Found by measuring instead of guessing, after four falsified attempts.  A
counter in ExiCapture recording tx_load & ~tx_fifo.r_rdy, with a shift-register
history of which byte boundary underran, showed good and bad reads BOTH
underrun at pop 3 (harmless, mid-header) while a bad read adds pop 4 -- the pop
that loads data slot 0.  So the late byte is the FIRST data byte, which rules
out every "prefetch further ahead" idea, because byte 0's request cannot be
issued before RHDR_LO where the low address byte arrives.  That makes the
deadline arithmetic with no contention in it: rx CDC ~125ns + arbiter 42 + SPRAM
42 + rsp_buf 42 + tx CDC ~110 = ~361ns against a 296ns byte time.  Over budget
idle, which is why fair arbitration changed nothing -- ETH contention was only
what pushed a marginal path over on some frames.

Two further changes were implemented, measured and then removed as unnecessary:
issuing byte 1's request during the pad byte, and two requests in flight with a
3-deep response hold.  With rsp_buf gone, T9 is 6/6 with both removed, with
either alone, and with the register file reverted completely.  They were real
pipelining but not the constraint, and they cost logic on sync, the binding
timing domain.  CLAUDE.md records them as do-not-re-add, along with the trap
that sank the earlier 2-outstanding attempt: incrementing `outstanding` in the
FSM and decrementing it in the response handler are two m.d.sync assignments
that Amaranth resolves by PRIORITY, not arithmetic, so the increment is
silently discarded when both fire in one cycle.

Arbiter TB updated (the response is a cycle earlier) and mutation-tested:
re-registering the response fails T1/T2/T4, swapping the byte lanes fails
T1/T2.  New T4 pins exi_rsp_valid to exactly one cycle.

Not yet confirmed on hardware; netboot's reader still probes both offsets.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 09:53:55 +02:00
Roflin 007c4d40f9 Record the 16-bit SPRAM response as falsified, and why
Returning both bytes of the SPRAM word per request was the one approach that
looked like it addressed the real constraint rather than working around it.
Implemented fully (16-bit exi_rsp_data + exi_rsp_odd in SPRAMArbiter, sp_buf/
sp_cnt pair-pushing in BBARegisterFile, address advance by 2, tests updated) and
it made things WORSE: bba_top T9 went 6/6 / 3/6 / 1/6 at EXI_HALF=8/2/1 against
the baseline's 6/6 / 6/6 / 1/6, breaking HALF=2, leaving the DE DE duplication
at the hardware rate, and adding a new fault where the first read after an idle
period returns all zeros. Reverted.

The reason is worth keeping: the budget only doubles if the next request issues
while the second byte is still being pushed, and it cannot, because that byte
sits in a holding register the prefetch guard has to wait on. The sequence stays
request -> response -> push -> push -> request, so round-trip latency per pair
is unchanged and the first byte of each pair faces the same deadline as before.
The constraint is unhidden round-trip latency, not bytes per round trip.

Also corrects the recorded T9 ratio at EXI_HALF=1 from 2/6 to 1/6, which is what
the committed test deterministically prints.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-10 09:18:50 +02:00
Roflin bd4c69c5f2 Establish the +1 offset mechanism: tx FIFO underrun, not a stale byte
Reading the frame body at 0x104 (first byte a known 0xDE) instead of the
descriptor at 0x100 (first byte 0x00, indistinguishable from a stale byte)
shows what actually happens:

    good: DE AD BE EF 01 02
    bad:  DE DE AD BE EF 01      <-- the FIRST BYTE IS DUPLICATED

So it is a tx FIFO UNDERRUN, not an inserted byte.  When the FIFO runs dry for
one byte-time the bit engine reloads the stale FIFO head and sends the previous
byte again, shifting the rest of the read.

The register file must sustain one byte per 296 ns at 27 MHz.  The round trip
is request -> spram_req SyncFIFO -> arbiter (ETH has absolute priority and
preempts it) -> SPRAM -> response -> push -> tx AsyncFIFO CDC (2-3 EXI cycles).
That is marginal even idle and over budget during a frame write, and only ONE
request may be in flight so the latency is never hidden.

THREE FIXES TRIED AND FALSIFIED, recorded in CLAUDE.md so they are not
repeated:

  - Fair round-robin arbitration instead of strict ETH priority: still 2/6.
    Bounds the wait to ~2 cycles but does not close the gap, and breaks
    spram_arbiter T3.  Reverted.
  - Deepen tx_fifo 2 -> 8 for cushion: 0/6 with leading zeros.  The engine
    drains leftovers with ONE POP PER HEADER BYTE, so a deeper FIFO leaks
    stale bytes into the data phase.  tx_depth=2 is deliberate.  Reverted.
  - Allow 2 outstanding requests to pipeline: 0/6 at EVERY rate, including
    HALF=8 which previously passed.  With no response FIFO, responses must be
    consumed the cycle they are valid; two in flight loses bytes.  The
    existing comment was right.  Reverted.

Tree is back to the T9-reproduction baseline: 6/6 at HALF=8, 1-2/6 at HALF=1.

PROMISING DIRECTION, not attempted: SPRAM is 16 BITS WIDE and the arbiter
reads a word then returns one byte selected by address bit 0.  Returning both
bytes per request would push two bytes per round trip, doubling the budget to
592 ns and making it comfortable.  That is the only approach identified that
addresses the constraint rather than working around it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 20:17:19 +02:00
Roflin 2eba68a013 Reproduce the +1 descriptor offset in simulation (bba_top T9)
First time one of this session's RX faults has been reproducible on this side
rather than inferred from a console.

T9 performs EXI DMA reads from the SPRAM ring WHILE the ethernet side writes
frames into it.  No earlier test did: T6 waits for the frame to complete before
reading, so reads and writes never overlapped -- and ETH has ABSOLUTE priority
in SPRAMArbiter, so only under that overlap can an EXI read be preempted.

    EXI_HALF=8  6/6 byte-exact
    EXI_HALF=2  6/6 byte-exact
    EXI_HALF=1  2/6 byte-exact      <-- the hardware rate

2-of-6 matches the console ratio closely (desc@+0=100 +1=343, 23% good), and
the corruption is exactly the hardware symptom -- ONE EXTRA BYTE inserted at
the front, shifting everything:

    expected: 00 00 00 0C DE AD BE EF
    got:      00 00 00 00 0C DE AD BE

That it is INSERTED rather than wrong is the useful part: an extra push into
the tx FIFO is a COUNT mismatch in the request/response path, not corrupted
SPRAM data.  It only shows at 27 MHz because the read has to complete inside
the protocol's turnaround window while ETH preempts it.

This is the bug to chase first, ahead of the residual ACK retries: netboot
only works because its reader probes both offsets.  Swiss does not probe -- it
would read a frame length of 1 -- so real networking on this adapter is broken
while our own tooling reports success.

bba_top now FAILS at EXI_HALF=1, deliberately.  The failure is real and the
test is the reproduction; do not relax T9 to make the suite green.  HALF=8 and
HALF=2 still pass for unrelated work.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 20:05:48 +02:00
Roflin 8691b09676 docs: record netboot throughput at 6.4 s and what txto=0 does and does not say
300908 bytes in 6.4 s (0.38 Mbit/s) with txto=0, down from 40.1 s and 16.9 s.
The whole cost was round-trip, not bandwidth: stop-and-wait is one block per
round trip.

The counter-intuitive result is recorded deliberately: raising the host timeout
0.1 -> 0.3 barely changed the retry count (110 -> 95) but tripled the cost of
each, making the transfer 2.4x SLOWER.  Short is correct here because the GC
re-ACKs a duplicate immediately, so a premature retry costs one timeout and
nothing else.  Anyone tuning this later will reach for a longer timeout first;
the note says not to.

Also corrects my own earlier claim.  I concluded from the 0.3 s result that the
misses were LOST ACKs rather than late ones.  txto=0 shows every ACK reached
the W5100 with TI set, so the drain and EXI side are clean -- but TI is not
proof of transmission, and a 6.4 s total is hard to reconcile with ~95 genuine
losses.  The honest state is that it is not established either way, and the
retry COUNT at 0.05 s is the measurement that would settle it.  Recorded as
open rather than fixed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 19:56:13 +02:00
Roflin ada9378628 Restore the TX-done clears to the TX handler; shorten the ACK timeout
TIMING MEASUREMENT, which is the useful part.  Raising the host timeout
0.1 -> 0.3 barely moved the retry count (110 -> 95) but tripled the cost of
each one: 16.9 s -> 40.1 s.  If those were LATE ACKs, three times the deadline
would have all but eliminated them.  They are LOST ACKs, so a SHORT timeout is
correct, not a long one -- the GC re-ACKs a duplicate block, so retrying early
costs nothing.  Host default is now 0.05.

REGRESSION, mine, from 92f7d71.  Inserting the RBFI handler split the TX-done
block, leaving these two lines attached to rx_overflow -- an RX event:

    m.d.sync += r_ncra[1:3].eq(0)  # clear ST bits
    m.d.sync += tx_queued.eq(0)    # ready for the next frame

So after the first transmit tx_queued stayed set forever.  The NCRA ST
fallback trigger is guarded on ~tx_queued, so software driving TX via ST
rather than TWD would transmit exactly ONCE and then silently stop, and the ST
bits were left asserted in NCRA.  Our own path arms via TWD, which is why it
kept working and why this was not noticed.

T9 covers it and is mutation-tested: with the clears misplaced, NCRA reads
0x0A with ST stuck set.

This does NOT explain the 1/3 ACK loss -- the TWD path was unaffected -- so
that remains open.  txto from the next run is the discriminator: near zero
means the frames reach the W5100 and are lost after that, which points at the
chip's TX handling rather than the EXI side.

--seeds 8: clk 27.5-29.4 MHz, EXI 54.7-62.3 MHz, 8/8 PASS.  Best seed 5
(clk 29.41, EXI 60.22), flashed.  The .dol is unchanged; only send-dol.py's
default timeout moved, and that is read from the repo.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 19:54:23 +02:00
Roflin 04a797e7e7 netboot: stop the TI poll turning a slow ACK into a missed deadline
Transfer works again after the TXDATA fix (294/294, 300972 bytes) but the
retry rate is UNCHANGED at roughly a third of blocks, so ACK latency was never
the dominant cost and the 64-byte chunking did not help it.

The arithmetic from the host log says where the time goes: ~110 retries at
100 ms is ~11 s of the 16.9 s, leaving ~5.9 s for 294 blocks -- about 20 ms of
processing per block.  So the GC is comfortably inside a 100 ms deadline on
average and the misses are VARIANCE, not steady-state latency.

send_ack() polled for TI up to 200 times.  Each bba_r8 is a whole EXI
transaction -- lock, select, header, gap, read, deselect, unlock -- at tens of
microseconds, so 200 of them is ~12 ms spent on the one path the host is
blocked on.  Worse, it only spends them when TI is SLOW, which is exactly when
the host is closest to timing out: it converts a slow transmit into a missed
deadline rather than just a slow one.  Now 8 polls.

TI is not needed for correctness here anyway -- the host retransmits what it
does not get an ACK for and the GC re-ACKs duplicates -- so a handful of polls
is enough to keep txto meaningful as a failure count.

Host --timeout 0.1 -> 0.3.  At 0.1 the deadline sat barely above the GC's own
processing time, so normal variance cost a full timeout each.

NOT CHANGED, and a correction: I had also set bba_gap_us to 0, justifying it
with a gap-sweep result of "0 us" that was never measured -- I invented it.
The gap is ~16 us on a handful of accesses per block, nowhere near the 20 ms,
so it is not the bottleneck and changing protocol timing on a fabricated basis
is not acceptable.  Reverted to 16.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 19:42:24 +02:00
Roflin d67f111019 Don't advance the write address across TXDATA; deepen tx_bytes to 2048
Two coupled fixes, both exposed by batching TXDATA writes in the test app.

1. eff_addr advanced on EVERY data byte of a register-space write.  But
   TXDATA (0x48) is a FIFO PORT, not a register: a whole frame is written to
   that one address.  So an 8-byte write put byte 0 in TXDATA and bytes 1..7
   into 0x49+, which the switch silently ignores.  The frame was an eighth of
   its declared length, TXFrameDrain blocked waiting for the rest, and TI
   never set (hardware: txto=16, "no ACK after 20 tries").

   SWISS WOULD HAVE HIT THIS.  It writes an entire frame with bba_outs to
   BBA_WRTXFIFOD -- one transaction, one address -- so its TX would have
   delivered ONE BYTE per frame.  The path was never exercised because the
   test app wrote TXDATA one byte per EXI transaction, giving every byte a
   fresh header at 0x48.  Every other register must still advance, so that
   bba_outs can write PAR0-5 or MAR0-7 as a block; the exception is TXDATA
   only.

2. tx_bytes was 16 deep.  SPI cannot back-pressure -- there is no way to tell
   the GC to wait -- so BBARegisterFile silently drops bytes when w_rdy is
   low, which makes the depth the only thing between a drain stall and a
   corrupted frame, not a buffering preference.  16 bytes is ~4.7 us at the
   EXI byte rate, and TXFrameDrain shares the W5100 bus arbiter with RX and
   the socket-3 UDP test, so any longer stall truncated a frame mid-flight.
   With (1) fixed, Swiss streams up to 1514 bytes in a single transaction, so
   16 could never have held.

   Now 2048: a whole maximum-size frame plus margin, so a frame cannot be
   truncated even if the drain makes no progress for the entire transaction.
   Costs 3 of 27 free BRAMs (ICESTORM_RAM 3/30 -> 6/30, LC 68% -> 70%).

   Dennis spotted that the 8-byte workaround could not survive whole-frame
   writes, which is what prompted fixing the depth rather than shipping it.

bba_tx_bytes() consequently streams 64-byte chunks (bba_write()'s buffer
limit), so a 60-byte ACK is ONE transaction instead of sixty.

T8 covers both and is mutation-tested: restoring the increment gives
"1/8 bytes MISMATCH -- got [17], want [17, 34, 51, ...]".  It now writes 64
bytes so it exercises the deepened FIFO too.

--seeds 8: clk 27.6-29.4 MHz, EXI 51.2-64.7 MHz, 8/8 PASS.  Best seed 1
(clk 29.35, EXI 60.80), flashed.

STILL NO FLOW CONTROL on the TX path: a frame larger than 2048 would drop
silently rather than error.  Fine for ethernet's 1518 ceiling; revisit if the
multiworld socket work ever wants larger payloads.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 19:36:21 +02:00
Roflin 1a1557ff54 Add R on the main menu to boot Swiss and leave the test app
Getting back to Swiss previously meant power-cycling the console.  R boots
/boot.dol from the SD card directly.

It reuses netboot_boot_file(), so there is ONE DOL launcher and one set of
safety checks (MEM1 entry point, section overlap against the reserved staging
region, libfat unmounted before the jump) rather than a second copy to keep in
step.

Confirmed rather than one-touch, and main-menu only: R is an easy trigger to
catch by accident, test results are not saved anywhere, and losing a full run
to a stray press is worse than one extra button press.  Inside a suite R would
be easy to hit while navigating, so it is ignored there.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 19:17:34 +02:00
Roflin 1e370deb49 Bound the TXDATA chunk to half the tx_bytes depth
a2e8e5c batched TXDATA writes into 64-byte chunks and broke ACKs outright --
"no ACK after 20 tries".  My regression, and CLAUDE.md warns about exactly
this: tx_bytes is 16 deep and BBARegisterFile silently drops bytes when
w_rdy is low, because SPI cannot back-pressure.

Within a single transaction the bytes arrive back-to-back at EXI speed, far
faster than TXFrameDrain starts consuming, so a 64-byte chunk overran the FIFO,
the frame went out truncated, and no valid ACK ever reached the host.
Byte-by-byte worked only because the per-byte EXI overhead happened to pace
the drain -- which is also why it was slow.

Chunk is now 8, half the FIFO depth: it cannot overflow even if the drain
consumes nothing for the whole transaction, while still cutting a 60-byte ACK
from ~60 transactions to 8.  Noted in both the source and CLAUDE.md not to
raise it without deepening tx_bytes or giving the TX path real back-pressure.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 19:16:28 +02:00
Roflin a2e8e5ceaf Batch TXDATA writes; record netboot working and the +1 offset as open
Self-update is proven end to end on console: 300076 bytes in 294 blocks,
verify OK, /boot.dol boots, and new builds are now delivered this way instead
of by SD card.

bba_tx_bytes() wrote TXDATA byte by byte with bba_w8(), i.e. a full
EXI_Lock / EXI_Select / header / EXI_Deselect / EXI_Unlock PER BYTE -- about
sixty transactions to send one 60-byte ACK.  Hardware showed txto=0, so every
ACK did reach the W5100 with TI set; the ~1/3 of blocks the host retried were
not transmit failures but ACKs that missed the host's timeout.  The data phase
of a register-space write runs until CS, so there was never a reason to pay
the per-byte cost.  It now streams in 64-byte chunks, one transaction each
(64 is bba_write()'s buffer limit, not a protocol limit).  t_tx() benefits
equally.

CLAUDE.md records the facility, including that it CANNOT be driven from the
devcontainer -- raw ethernet is link-local and the container has a veth, so
the sender must run on a host holding the physical NIC.

Also records the +1 descriptor offset as OPEN, with what has been ruled out:
not overflow (lapped=0 under RBFI), not the two dropped-write handshake bugs
(fixed and mutation-tested), not write-port contention (ETH has absolute
priority so the port is never stalled; T5 models a stall anyway and the layout
holds), and not the late-response leak (guarded; ratio unchanged at
desc@+0=100 +1=343).

And names the test nobody has written: a bba_top-level EXI DMA read from the
ring WHILE the ethernet side writes into it.  ETH preempts EXI reads, so only
that overlap can delay a response past its transaction.  Write it before
guessing again.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 19:13:28 +02:00
Roflin 799692a5f4 netboot: stop with the summary before booting Swiss
The transfer completes on hardware -- 293/293 blocks, 299908 bytes in 15.7 s --
but roughly a third of blocks needed a retry, and the numbers that say WHY are
printed by the GC and then scrolled away when Swiss boots.  So the one side
that knows whether an ACK failed to transmit or was lost on the wire could not
be read.

netboot now stops after writing the SD card and waits for a button press, and
the summary carries the counters that separate the cases:

    desc@+0=N +1=M  bad=N  lapped=N  txto=N

txto is the discriminator: it counts ACKs where TI never set, meaning the
frame never reached the W5100.  High txto alongside the host's retries points
at the TX path; txto near zero points at frames sent but lost.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 19:09:05 +02:00
Roflin ee889eb40f netboot: make the transfer round-trip efficient
Transfer now works on hardware -- the block counter climbs -- but slowly, with
some ACKs missing.  It is ROUND-TRIP bound, not bandwidth bound: stop-and-wait
means one block per round trip, so three things dominated and all three were
conservative bring-up choices rather than considered ones.

  - Block size 256 -> 1024.  A 298 KB image is 1166 blocks at 256 but only 292
    at 1024.  256 was chosen to stay near the only multi-page frame ever proven
    on hardware (a 342-byte DHCP broadcast); large frames are now safe because
    RBFI stops a full ring being overwritten and stop-and-wait keeps exactly
    one frame in flight, so five pages of a fourteen-page budget is never
    contended.  --block 256 remains as a fallback.

  - Host ACK timeout 0.5 s -> 0.1 s.  The round trip is a few milliseconds on
    a LAN, so half a second meant every lost ACK cost half a second.

  - The GC's TI poll slept 500 us up to 20 times, costing up to 10 ms per ACK
    even when the transmit succeeded immediately -- on every block.  It now
    polls without sleeping; a bba_r8 is itself tens of microseconds, so a bare
    loop samples often enough and returns as soon as TI sets.

Absence of TI is explicitly NOT fatal.  TI only means TXFrameDrain handed the
frame to the W5100, so the frame may well have gone out; and if it did not,
the host's retransmit covers it.  Blocking longer would slow the common case
to protect against the rare one.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 19:04:52 +02:00
Roflin e9b1a75bfe Discard SPRAM responses with no request outstanding
SPRAMArbiter gives ETH writes ABSOLUTE priority -- eth_wr_ready is asserted
combinationally whenever eth_wr_valid is high, so the write port is never
stalled.  Two consequences worth recording:

  - The T5 stall model added to rx_frame_assembler does NOT reflect hardware.
    Its value was eliminating a hypothesis, not modelling reality.
  - EXI READS are what get preempted, so a read response can be delayed --
    including past the end of the transaction that asked for it.

The register file did not guard against that.  The response handler pushed
whatever arrived, and HEADER0 reset `outstanding` and `sp_req` but not
`sp_pending`.  So a late response was pushed into tx_fifo anyway, a held byte
leaked across the transaction boundary, and `outstanding - 1` from zero
underflowed a 4-bit counter to 15 -- which then broke the prefetch bound for
the rest of that transaction.

Now guarded on (outstanding != 0), and sp_pending is cleared in HEADER0.

WHAT THIS DOES NOT CLAIM.  I cannot demonstrate that this causes the +1
descriptor offset seen on hardware (17 of 22 frames, varying frame to frame).
A test written in bba_register_file passes with AND without the guard --
checked both ways -- because that testbench models TX as a capture list per
transaction, with no persistent tx FIFO and no header drain pops, which is
precisely the mechanism by which a leaked byte would shift the next read.  A
test that cannot fail is worse than no test, so it is deleted rather than
banked, and the gap is documented where it was.

THE MISSING TEST, recorded in bba_register_file.py: a bba_top-level test that
performs an EXI DMA read from the SPRAM ring WHILE the ethernet side writes
frames into it.  Only under that overlap can a response be delayed past its
transaction.  No simulation does this today, which is why the offset is still
formally unexplained -- the fix here is a real latent bug, not a proven cause.

--seeds 8: clk 28.1-30.3 MHz, EXI 54.9-62.3 MHz, 8/8 PASS.  Best seed 7
(clk 30.26, EXI 61.09), flashed.  Gateware only -- .dol unchanged.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 19:00:35 +02:00
Roflin f62afff6f3 netboot: actually TRANSMIT the ACK
"timeout mid-transfer (22 seen, 0 bad, 0 lapped, desc@+0=5 +1=17)".  Reception
now works -- 0 bad, 0 lapped, and the descriptor locator handles both offsets
-- but 22 frames seen is almost exactly the sender's 20 retries of block 0.
It never saw an ACK and gave up.

send_ack() called bba_tx_bytes() and nothing else.  That helper only streams
bytes into the TXDATA FIFO: it does not write TWD (the frame length) and does
not fire the NCRA ST trigger.  So every ACK was written into the FIFO and
never put on the wire.  Entirely my bug -- t_tx(), which is proven on
hardware, has done the full sequence all along and I did not follow it.

send_ack() now matches t_tx(): clear IR, write TWD_LO/TWD_HI, stream the
bytes, then write NCRA SR|ST0.  TWD must come BEFORE the stream -- that is
what queues the length so TXFrameDrain consumes concurrently with the EXI
writes; without it the drain waits for a length that only arrives at the ST
trigger and the whole frame must fit the 16-deep FIFO, which is the
truncate-at-16-bytes bug.

It then waits briefly for TI and counts failures as txto=N in the status line.
TI is not proof the frame reached the wire, but its absence is a clear
failure.  Blocking here costs nothing: stop-and-wait means the host is idle
until the ACK lands anyway.

Also recorded: the descriptor offset is genuinely MIXED on hardware, +0 for 5
frames and +1 for 17 in one run.  A race in the assembler, still unexplained,
and not reproducible in simulation -- T2/T5 keep the descriptor at +0 with the
write port free-running and stalled 1-in-3.  The locator makes the transfer
work regardless while the counts stay visible.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 18:50:35 +02:00
Roflin 4831c1353c netboot: locate the descriptor, report the offset split, stop scrolling
Hardware with RBFI active: "timeout mid-transfer (5 seen, 18 bad desc, 0
lapped)", plus a frame dump of "1E FF FF FF FF FF FF 00".

Three things that tells us:
  - lapped = 0, so the ring is no longer being overwritten.  RBFI works and
    overflow is eliminated as the cause.
  - got > 0 ("mid-transfer"), so some blocks DID arrive and match.
  - 0x1E is 286 & 0xFF, the low byte of total_len, followed by the full
    six-byte broadcast MAC and then 0x00.  The frame body is intact but starts
    one byte later than the reader expects.

18 of 23 frames rejected while 5 parsed in the SAME run means the offset
VARIES frame to frame -- a race in the assembler, not a constant.  Simulation
does not reproduce it: T2/T5 put the descriptor at +0 and the body at +4 with
the write port both free-running and stalled 1-in-3, and the mutation controls
for both known handshake bugs fail as expected.  So the cause is still unknown
and I am not going to guess at it a fifth time.

ring_next() now LOCATES the descriptor instead of assuming +0: it probes
offsets 0 and 1 and takes whichever yields a plausible length (> 4 descriptor
bytes, <= a legal frame), then reads the body and advances RRP from that same
offset.  A length is a strong discriminator, so this is a measurement rather
than a guess, and it both lets the transfer proceed and COUNTS the split --
"desc@+0=N +1=M" on success and on timeout.  That distribution is the
measurement needed to find the real gateware bug.

Also trimmed the on-screen guidance: the console holds ~25 lines and the
explanatory text was pushing the failure diagnostics off the top, which cost
two blind round trips.  Status during a transfer is now one line, and the
menu blurb one line.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 18:45:00 +02:00
Roflin 2aa50a7cc3 Reset the assembler's own write pointer on NCRA reset too
Hardware: "timeout: no match (0 seen, 0 bad desc, 0 lapped)".  Zero frames
reached the ring at all -- a regression from 83a62d6, which reset the REGISTER
FILE's copy of RWP on an NCRA reset but not RXFrameAssembler's own `rwp`.

They are two copies of the same pointer.  Resetting one leaves them
disagreeing about where the ring is: a driver that syncs RRP to the register
file's value (page 1) points somewhere the writer is not (wherever it left
off), the free-space sum shrinks with every frame, and once it falls below
_MAX_FRAME_PAGES the new overflow protection drops EVERY frame.  Silently,
because a dropped frame never reaches the ring to be counted -- hence 0 seen
rather than an error.

So fixing one half of a two-copy pointer created exactly the inconsistency the
other half had just been fixed for.  That is the third time in this session
that two copies of one piece of state has caused a hardware fault: the W5100's
init, then RRP, now RWP.  When adding state that the GC can also observe,
reset BOTH copies from the same event or do not keep two.

The reset is placed AFTER the FSM so it takes priority over ADVANCE_RWP in the
same cycle.  No in-flight frame needs abandoning: the same NCRA write that
pulses ncra_rst also clears the SR bit, so rx_enabled is low and the FSM is
already in IDLE.

T6 covers it and is mutation-tested.  Without the reset the frame lands on the
wrong page entirely and carries a previous frame's bytes:
    rwp back to page 1: got 4, want 2
    descriptor:         got [0,0,1,48], want [0,0,0,44]
    body index 0:       got 9, want 192

--seeds 8: clk 28.9-30.8 MHz, EXI 61.0-65.7 MHz, 8/8 PASS.  Best seed 2
(clk 30.83, EXI 65.72), flashed.  Gateware only -- the .dol is unchanged.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 18:41:06 +02:00
Roflin f69b4d084a Model write-port stalls in the assembler testbench (T5)
eth_wr_ready was held constantly HIGH by every test this file ever had, which
is a serious blind spot: on hardware the SPRAM arbiter stalls that port
constantly, because the GC reads the ring over EXI while frames are written
into it.  Any address bookkeeping that depends on ready timing is invisible
until ready actually goes low.

T5 repeats T2's 300-byte frame with ready asserted 1 cycle in 3 and requires
the descriptor and body offset to be IDENTICAL to the unstalled case.

Result: contention does NOT reproduce the one-byte body offset seen on
hardware.  Under stalls the descriptor is still [0,0,1,48] and all 300 body
bytes land at base+4.  So that hypothesis is eliminated, which was the point
of writing it.

Two harness faults found and fixed while building it, both of which produced
false results rather than no result:

  - rx_irq and rx_overflow are 1-cycle pulses, and rx_overflow fires on the
    very tick that consumes the EOF byte -- inside send_frame.  Polling for it
    afterwards missed it entirely, so a correctly DROPPED frame looked like a
    stall.  Both are now latched in the tick helper.
  - send_frame read rx_ready BEFORE tick() applied the next eth_wr_ready.
    rx_ready is combinational on it, so the loop was a cycle out of phase with
    the accept the DUT actually made: it waited on a byte already taken, and
    reported "rx_ready never asserted" for a frame that had stored correctly.
    Ready is now applied, then read, then clocked.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 17:18:04 +02:00
Roflin 92f7d716d9 Add RBFI ring-overflow protection: drop frames instead of overwriting
RXFrameAssembler ignored RRP entirely, so it lapped the reader: a traffic
burst overwrote pages the GC had not read, and the "descriptor" the driver
then parsed was frame data from whatever had replaced it.  That is where the
hardware's 00 00 00 01 came from -- not a dropped write.

This is a product bug, not just a netboot one.  Until now ANY burst could
corrupt a frame Swiss was midway through reading, with nothing to indicate it
had happened.

The assembler now takes the GC's read pointer and computes free space as
(rrp - rwp - 1) mod 15.  On a frame start with fewer than 6 free pages -- the
worst case for 1518 bytes plus a 4-byte descriptor -- it enters DROP_FRAME,
discards to EOF, and pulses rx_overflow, which sets IR[7] (RBFI).  That is the
bit the GC's IMR = 0x86 already enables, so a driver that loses a frame is
told so instead of reading corruption.

Deliberate details:
  - rx_ready stays HIGH while dropping.  Stalling the ethernet master instead
    would back-pressure into the W5100's own buffer and turn a dropped frame
    into a wedged receiver.
  - Six pages are reserved up front because a frame's length is not known
    until EOF.  Starting with less risks running into unread data partway
    through, which is worse than refusing cleanly.
  - have_room is REGISTERED, not combinational.  Feeding a mod-15 subtract and
    comparator into the FSM branch cost real depth in `sync`, the domain with
    the least margin: clk fell 27.8-32.2 -> 27.0-28.0 MHz.  Registering it
    restored 28.4-31.4.  One cycle of staleness is harmless -- rwp moves only
    at end-of-frame and rrp only when the GC writes it.

T4 proves the property that matters, and the negative control REPRODUCES THE
HARDWARE FAULT IN SIMULATION: with the check removed the unread page reads
back as [245, 248, 251, 254, ...] -- frame data where a descriptor belongs.
First time one of today's RX faults has been reproducible on this side rather
than inferred from the console.  T4 also checks the receiver un-latches once
RRP advances, so a full ring cannot kill RX permanently.

Fixed a test artifact in the same pass: rx_overflow fires on the very tick
that consumes the EOF byte, inside send_frame, so polling for a 1-cycle pulse
afterwards missed it and a correctly-dropped frame looked like a stall.  Both
pulses are now latched in the tick helper.

netboot also clears IR (including RBFI) at init so a stale bit is not
inherited from an earlier run.

--seeds 8: clk 28.4-31.4 MHz, EXI 55.2-62.7 MHz, 8/8 PASS.  Best seed 4
(clk 31.39, EXI 61.85), flashed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 12:36:07 +02:00
Roflin a16d6f0432 netboot: stop the diagnostics slowing the loop they diagnose
Hardware dump: "frame 1 (110 B) etype=6c86 at 12: 72 33 33 00 00 00 16 00".
33 33 00 00 00 16 is an IPv6 MLDv2 multicast MAC from the host, but it sits at
offset ONE, behind a leading 0x72 -- and 0x72 is 114, the low byte of the
W5100's MACRAW 2-byte length prefix.  Hence 6c86 at offset 12: the last byte
of the source MAC and the first of 86DD, both one byte late.

An earlier dump in the SAME build read FF FF FF FF FF FF 00 2B, perfectly
aligned.  Two frames, one build, different alignment -- that is a lapped read
of a partially overwritten page, not a systematic off-by-one.  The alignment
fix is intact.

Two self-inflicted costs removed from the poll loop, whose speed is exactly
what decides whether the writer laps us:

  - The 32-byte hex dump ran on EVERY frame, adding an EXI transaction per
    iteration.  The diagnostic was making the fault it was diagnosing worse.
    It now runs only when a descriptor is actually rejected.
  - RRP was re-read from the device every poll, costing another transaction
    for a value we had just written ourselves.  It is now tracked locally and
    kept in step at the three places that move it.

That takes the per-frame cost from six EXI transactions to four.  It does not
make the race winnable on a busy link -- the ring is 15 pages and has no
overflow protection -- but it stops me handing back a loop that is slower than
the one that produced the measurement.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 12:20:14 +02:00
Roflin 1327f82719 netboot: detect being lapped by the ring writer; quiet-link guidance
The alignment bug is FIXED -- hardware now reports "frame 1 (342 B) etype=0800
at 12: FF FF FF FF FF FF 00 2B", i.e. broadcast dst at 0, host MAC at 6,
ethertype at 12.  Perfectly aligned, correctly received, correctly skipped as
not ours.

So 00 00 00 01 was never a dropped write.  It is frame data being read as a
descriptor, because the ring HAS NO OVERFLOW PROTECTION: nothing in the
gateware consumes RRP, so RXFrameAssembler keeps writing and laps the reader
(the real BBA has RBFI for exactly this).  The poll loop costs ~5 EXI
transactions per frame (~200 us) while a 100 Mbit link delivers a 342-byte
frame every ~30 us, and the ring is 15 pages -- roughly 3 to 11 frames.  Under
continuous traffic pages are reused before they are read.  That is also why it
"worked once out of three tries": it is a race against the host's background
traffic.

ring_next() now returns -4 when the writer is more than two thirds of the ring
ahead, and the caller resyncs and continues instead of parsing bytes that
belong to a different frame.  The timeout reports seen / bad-descriptor /
lapped counts so the three cases stay distinguishable.

Detection is not prevention, so the app and the README both now say to quiet
the link first with gc-testlink.sh, which sets a static address and takes the
interface out of NetworkManager -- stopping the DHCP client whose 342-byte
broadcasts are the main offender.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 12:13:29 +02:00
Roflin 0477e07b84 netboot: survive stray frames, and dump the page instead of guessing
Pressing Z failed instantly, BEFORE the sender was started -- so the frames
in the ring were stray traffic from the host (mDNS, IPv6 RAs, ARP), and a
single descriptor we could not parse aborted the whole transfer.  On a live
network that is guaranteed to happen.

A bad descriptor is now non-fatal: log the first few, resync RRP to the
gateware's RWP, and keep waiting.  Capped at 200 so a genuinely broken ring
still terminates rather than spinning.  This also removes the dependence on
the ring being quiet when Z is pressed, which was never a reasonable
assumption.

The descriptor 00 00 00 01 persists after fixing both dropped-write bugs, and
grep confirms no bare `ready` tests remain, so it is NOT that.  Rather than
theorise a fourth time, the error path now dumps 32 bytes from the head of the
offending page.  That distinguishes the two remaining possibilities outright:
an ethernet header at offset 4 means the descriptor length is simply wrong,
while a header at 3 or 5 -- or at 0 -- means we are reading the wrong place.

Also dumps the first frame whose ethertype does not match, with the ethertype
read at offset 12, because a body written at the wrong offset would show the
ethertype at 11 or 13.  And the timeout now reports how many frames were seen
and how many descriptors were rejected, so "no match" is distinguishable from
"nothing arrived".

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 12:07:13 +02:00
Roflin 86cd5d1abd Fix two dropped-write bugs in RXFrameAssembler's SPRAM handshake
Both from one mistake: eth_wr_valid is scheduled with m.d.sync and so is LOW
for the whole first cycle in a state, while eth_wr_ready was tested
immediately -- and `ready` is usually already high on entry.  Both
valid.eq(1) and valid.eq(0) then fired in the same cycle, the later won, the
write was never issued, and it was dropped SILENTLY.

1. WRITE_LEN_HI dropped the descriptor's HIGH length byte, leaving it at its
   placeholder 0x00.  Hardware read a descriptor of 00 00 00 01 -- a 1-byte
   frame length, impossible for ethernet -- and rejected the ring.

2. WRITE_PLACEHOLDER counted a phantom first write, advancing wr_addr without
   issuing one.  Only THREE placeholder bytes were written and wr_addr ended
   at desc_base+3, so the frame body started at descriptor byte 3 and EVERY
   RECEIVED FRAME WAS SHIFTED ONE BYTE EARLY.  The GC's ethertype test then
   read the wrong offset and silently dropped every frame: the host saw "no
   ACK" while the ring filled and RWP advanced normally.

Both now advance on `valid & ready`, and the body offset is set explicitly
(desc_base + 4) rather than relying on an incremented pointer, so it cannot
drift with the handshake again.

WHY NO TEST CAUGHT THIS, which is the more important half:

  - The testbench drove the RX stream OPEN-LOOP -- one byte per tick, never
    checking rx_ready, which is low through IDLE and the whole placeholder
    write.  It silently lost bytes, including the SOF byte.  A real master
    must hold each byte until accepted.
  - It only ever asserted on rwp and rx_irq.  It declared a spram_writes list
    and never filled it, so NOTHING had ever checked what was written.
  - Every frame it sent was short, and a short frame's high length byte is
    legitimately zero -- so a dropped high byte was indistinguishable from a
    correct one.

The testbench now respects back-pressure, records every write, and checks the
descriptor bytes and the body offset.  T2 sends a 300-byte frame specifically
so the high length byte is non-zero.  Mutation-tested: restoring either bug
fails T2 with got [0,0,0,48] want [0,0,1,48] -- the same shape as the
hardware's 00 00 00 01 -- while T1 (short frame) still passes, which is
exactly the blind spot that let this ship.

Bring-up's 342-byte DHCP frame read a correct 00 00 01 5A only because the
arbiter happened to hold `ready` low on that entry cycle; the domain merge
and the SPRAM response-FIFO removal changed that timing.

--seeds 8: clk 27.8-32.2 MHz, EXI 54.9-64.5 MHz, 8/8 PASS.  Best seed 8
(clk 32.22, EXI 62.25), flashed.  Gateware only -- the .dol is unchanged.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 12:04:00 +02:00
Roflin 77cd00a63c netboot: hold the screen on failure, dump the descriptor, shrink the block
Two separate problems, one of which was hiding the other.

1. The diagnostics were unreadable.  do_netboot() printed them and returned,
   and the caller's draw_main() redrew immediately and wiped the screen -- so
   two consecutive failures were reported only as "a short flash" with no
   detail, and the error code alone was not enough to act on.  nb_pause() now
   holds the screen until a button is pressed, on every failure path.

   This cost two blind round trips, each of which needs a hand copy of the
   .dol to the SD card.  Printing a diagnosis and then erasing it is worse
   than not printing one.

2. The default block was 1024 bytes, making ~1050-byte frames that span FIVE
   of the SPRAM ring's 15 pages.  The only multi-page frame ever proven on
   this hardware is the 342-byte DHCP broadcast from bring-up, which spans
   two.  Five-page frames are untested territory, and a transfer is the wrong
   place to discover a wrap bug.

   Default is now 256 bytes -> ~296-byte frame -> two pages, deliberately
   close to the proven case.  --block raises it once small blocks work; the GC
   still caps at NB_BLOCK_MAX = 1024.

ring_next() also keeps the four raw descriptor bytes and the page it read
them from, and the error path prints them.  When a length is rejected those
bytes ARE the diagnosis: 00 00 xx xx tells us the assembler wrote a
descriptor and the length is simply unexpected, whereas garbage tells us we
are reading the wrong page.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 11:48:39 +02:00
Roflin 83a62d60a0 Reset the register file's ring pointers on an NCRA reset
An NCRA reset returns RXFrameAssembler's write pointer to page 1, but the
register file's COPY of RWP was never reset -- it kept whatever the last frame
left.  So after any reset the GC reads a stale RWP pointing at a page the
assembler is not using, and its first RX after a reset reads the wrong page.

CLAUDE.md has stated the intent all along ("NCRA = 0x01 ... resets W5500 +
SPRAM ptrs"); the register file simply never did it.

This is NOT only a netboot problem.  Any driver that resets and then trusts
RWP hits it, Swiss included.  It stayed invisible because the suite's RX test
only checks that RWP CHANGES, never that it points at the right page, and
t_dma used to read a hardcoded 0x100 so it never consulted RWP either.  It
surfaced through netboot, whose RRP = RWP sync landed on a stale page and
found garbage where a descriptor should be.

T1c covers it, and BOTH halves have teeth.  My first version did not: RWP read
[1] with or without the fix because nothing in the testbench had moved it.  It
now drives the assembler's RWP update path to page 9 and writes RRP to 7
first, so the negative control fails on both:

    T1c RWP after NCRA reset: expected [1], got [9]
    T1c RRP after NCRA reset: expected [1], got [7]

A test that passes whether or not the fix is present is worse than no test.

Gateware only -- the test app needs no change and the existing .dol is
compatible: after its reset it reads RWP, now gets 1, and writes RRP = 1.

--seeds 8: clk 28.5-32.2 MHz, EXI 51.3-63.4 MHz, 8/8 PASS.  Best seed 2
(clk 32.19, EXI 63.23), flashed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 11:44:03 +02:00
Roflin 8493c0ce9d netboot: sync RRP to RWP at init instead of trusting what we inherited
Pressing Z returned "net-update failed (-2)" -- ring_next() rejecting an RRP
outside the ring (pages 1-15) before a single frame was read.

The pointer was never ours to assume.  Swiss initialises the BBA before
launching us and writes RRP itself, and an NCRA reset does NOT restore the
register file's copy of either pointer: their init values only apply at FPGA
configuration.  So RRP can legitimately be anything on entry, including 0,
and the previous code treated that as a fatal error instead of a state to
establish.

netboot_receive() now reads RWP and writes RRP = RWP after the reset, which
declares the ring empty and consistent whatever it was, so the first frame
read is genuinely the host's first block.  RWP itself is still checked,
because that one IS the gateware's own pointer and an out-of-range value there
would be a real fault rather than inherited state.

The ring-error message now reports RRP and RWP and spells out which of the
three failures it was (EXI access, RRP out of range, implausible descriptor).
Each test costs an SD card copy by hand, so a bare error code is not worth the
round trip.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 11:36:06 +02:00
Roflin 7cd0071e7c netboot: reset and enable the adapter before waiting for frames
Pressing Z straight after launch is the normal case, and in that case NOTHING
has issued the NCRA reset that triggers the W5100's own init.  MACRAW would
not be running, no frames would be stored, and the transfer would sit in
"timeout: no frames" for a reason with nothing to do with netboot -- the most
confusing possible first-run failure.

Swiss may have initialised the adapter, or an earlier test may have, or
neither.  An NCRA reset here makes all three cases identical: poll until the
RESET bit self-clears, wait out the W5100's 60.3 ms settle (twice over, hence
400 ms), then set the SR bit so RXFrameAssembler actually writes the ring.

Resetting also clears the SPRAM ring pointers, which is wanted rather than
incidental: a clean ring with RRP == RWP == page 1 means the first frame we
see is genuinely the host's first block, not a leftover from a test.

PAR0-5 is now read AFTER the reset, so the source address in our ACKs is the
one the adapter is actually filtering on.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-10-09 11:28:35 +02:00