Re: [avrdude-dev] Re: Programmers errors on linux, help!

[Alex Shepherd]

> > Could this perhaps be due to power supply issues?
>
> I had try it in both configurations - with powering from parallel port,
> and from external power supply - effect is the same.
>
> I can't understand the strange behavior of func usleep() - when I
> set SLOW_TOGGLE=1 avrdude hangs on included calls to uslepp(). But this
> function works correct in another places in par.c! What's going on ?
> I don't know.

I am having similar problems in that I am seeing verify errors sometimes
(maybe 1-2 in 5) when I run on Win2k. However when I boot Linux on the same
hardware, it runs fine. I tried a number of things at the time to see if it
changed the behaviour but so far I cannot isolate the problem.

On Linux the programming time is about 10-11 seconds and seems to work fine,
but on Win2k it is only about 6 seconds and fails periodically, so it does
start to smell like a problem with timing.

I am also wondering about the usleep function as I think most of my failures
are the first 2 bytes on a 64 byte block. I may have had some in other
locations, but I am pretty sure they almost always 64 byte aligned.

My system is a dual 466 Celeron and i wonder if there are holes in the
usleep function with SMP/threading in Cygwin. I did some searching to try
and find Cygwin source for usleep and did find some code, but there was also
some comments about changing the usleep implementation to use nanoSleep() so
maybe there has been an issue with how usleep previously worked and now they
have fixed it. I'm not familiar enough with Cygwin to know really what this
all means. Maybe some of you guys will know more. Also it appear that the
minimum time delay on Win2k is not as fine as Linux so that may also have
something to do with it.

 I have tried it on another uniprocessor PC (600 MHz Compaq Small Form
Factor, Deskpro and it weems to work ok so that makes me wonder anout the
SMP. I need to try and find a way to turn off one of my processors on Win2k
and see if that makes a difference.

I have not looked at this in the last couple of weeks as I've been on other
things and PonyProg from command line works well enough, but I would like to
resolve this.

Cheers

Alex