January 18, 2007

Overview

The following changes are introduced in this release:

• New assembly option for H.100 interface population.

• Update to the Solaris device driver.

• Update to the Windows device driver.

• Modifications to utility programs.

• Windows installer now includes the dp54xled program.

• Component versions for this release.

• Known problems.

New Assembly Option for H.100 Interface Population

As of September, 2006, the H.100 interface is a special order assembly option for DPT4 boards. DPT4 boards do not include the H.100 interface by default.

The board serialization information now includes a new assembly option to specify whether or not the H.100 interface is populated. The dpserial program is modified to query about the H.100 population and both the dpserial and dpinfo programs are modified to display the setting of this option.

Note that boards shipped in late 2006 (serial numbers 50200398 through 50200515) may not have this option set properly in their serialization information. This will not affect the operation of the boards since the H.100 assembly option data is only informational.

Update to the Solaris Device Driver

A minor change to the Solaris device driver is included in this release. It is modified to check all fields of the PCI device identification information, including the vendor and device IDs for the FPGA that includes the PCI interface. This was done to avoid conflicts with an updated version of the DPT board that is currently in development. Future versions of the device driver will then be able to recognize the difference between the original and updated versions of the board.

The device drivers for Linux and Windows have always checked the complete device identification fields.

Update to the Windows Device Driver

The Windows device driver is fixed to include the code for the PCI_SEEK ioctl when compiled for release mode. This operation is required for setting up DMA transfers from board memory to the host which is used by the dpdmaxfer diagnostic program.

Modifications to Utility Programs

Besides the changes to programs for the H.100 interface assembly option, described above, the following changes are made to utility programs:

The dpinfo program now reports version information for the Comet framers and will display the phrase, "uninitialized value", instead of "65535 KHz" for clock rate values that have not been set in the EEROM.

The dpserial program no longer reports the Comet version information.

The dpfind program is modified to display full 8-digit serial numbers and to not display the serialization date for boards.

Windows Installer Now Includes the dp54xled Program

The dp54xled program is now included in the Windows installer. This program tests some basic operations of the DM5420 smPCI module. The file, dp54xled.exe, is installed with the other diagnostic programs, in the cac\dpt\diag folder.

Component Versions for This Release

The DPT4 software release includes several components of software and hardware FPGA configurations. All the components have the same major and minor version numbers. However the update version number of each component may vary depending on the number of changes and iterations each component has gone through between general distribution releases.

The components and their versions for DPT4 Software Release 1.4.9 are:

Component:	Version:
API Library and Programs	1.4.9
Solaris Device Driver	1.4.8
Linux Device Driver	1.4.7
Windows Device Driver	1.4.7
Embedded MIPS Loader	1.4.0
Embedded MIPS Application	1.4.9
PLD Configuration	1.4.0
Host FPGA Configuration	1.4.5
Expansion FPGA Configuration	1.4.1

Known Problems

The following problems are known to exist in this release:
• Large amounts of channel data being written to the transmit buffers can saturate the board's local bus, preventing the MIPS processor from obtaining access to the board's local bus long enough to miss buffer interrupts. This has been known to cause corruption of transmitted data and timeout errors reported by the dpchantest diagnostic program. The problem mostly appears on fast systems that are capable of downloading data fast enough to cause the local bus to saturate.

  The only work-around at this time is for applications to limit the rate at which they write data to transmit channels. The suggested limit is an aggregate download rate to approximately 24 Mbytes per second or, assuming all E1 channels are being used, 190 Kbytes per second per time slot.

• The DPT4 software is not currently compatible with Solaris 10 for x86 platforms due to a problem with allocating DMA memory.

  The Sparc platform version of Solaris 10 is compatible. Problems concerning compiler warnings have been handled with minor changes in the source code (described above).

• On rare occasions the DPT4 can hang during the initialization process. This has only been known to occur when being initialized the first time following a power cycle.