Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Understanding flow control

[Matt Ettus]

On 01/15/2010 03:08 PM, Tom Gross wrote:
> yes of course we have two separate gig-e cards.   if the usrp2 is
> sending us "pause" commands then it seems evident the usrp2 is having
> trouble keeping up, not the computer.

First off, the USRP2 will only send pause frames when you are 
transmitting, not receiving.  Pause frames are not generated due to the 
USRP2 being unable to keep up.  Pause frames are not generated due to 
the computer not being able to keep up.  Pause frames are generated as a 
normal part of the transmission process.  This is fundamental, and you 
need to understand exactly why.



When you are transmitting, the USRP2 can only consume samples at a fixed 
rate, determined by the clock rate (100 MHz) and the interpolation rate 
(4 or higher).  No matter what that rate is, your computer should be 
able to generate samples faster than that.  Since your computer does not 
have a 100 MHz clock to pace the generation of those samples, it will 
generate them too fast.  When they are sent the USRP2, which can only 
consume them at a certain rate, they will pile up in the buffers of the 
USRP2.  Once the buffers get full enough, the USRP2 will send pause 
frames back to the computer to tell it to wait until the samples it has 
can work their way through the pipeline.

Again, this is completely normal and not because your computer is too 
slow, and not because the USRP2 is too slow.  It is a normal consequence 
of the practicalities of generating samples asynchronously to their 
consumption.

So in normal transmit operation, you will see large numbers of pause 
frames going from the USRP2 to the computer.  Do not be alarmed.


When receiving, the USRP only generates data as fast as samples are 
created by the ADC clock, divided by the decimation rate.  If the 
decimation rate is 4 then the sample rate is 25 MS/s at 32 bits per 
sample, or 800 mbits.  This fits just fine into gigabit ethernet, and so 
it all just goes out almost immediately over the ethernet, and nothing 
ever backs up and stalls.  If your computer couldn't keep up, then it 
MIGHT WANT TO send pause frames, but we have disabled that.  Instead, if 
your computer can't keep up it will drop frames and you'll see "S" in 
your terminal window.  Get a faster computer or do less processing if 
you see this.

If you were to try a decimation of 3 or lower, then you would be 
generating more than 1 gigabit per second, and the ethernet wouldn't 
keep up, and the buffers in the USRP2 would overflow and cause an 
overrun ("O") error.  You shouldn't be doing this because it won't work.

I hope this has cleared it up.  To summarize -- each USRP2 needs its own 
Gigabit ethernet card to talk to EVEN if it is using only a tiny 
fraction of the total bandwidth.  And those cards need to be configured 
to honor flow control.

Matt