[sigsegv11]

Dear Friends,

For multi-master/multi-slave AMBA, Is it possible to detect AXI bus lock up? And how to do that (either by software or hardware)?

Thanks & Regards
Baojun

[JD]

Baojun,

You would need to monitor the ready and valid signals on the various AXI buses to detect when transactions stop completing, which "might" then indicate the bus has locked up.

Note that I only say "might", the AXI spec doesn't state that a transaction must complete within a defined number of cycles, so the number of cycles you choose to indicate possible lock up would depend on what your masters and slaves normally take to complete transfers.

So this counting of cycles from valid being driven high to when ready is then sampled high and the transfer handshake completes could be implemented by a hardware block (some sort of watchdog timer) if you were worried about possible lock ups, and I guess you could also implement this in software.

JD

[Vaibhav Malik]

I agree and just to add a quick note, the dependencies between the channel handshake signals can be helpful to track. This helps to prevent a deadlock situation.

JD, on 21 September 2011 - 10:11 AM, said:

Baojun,

You would need to monitor the ready and valid signals on the various AXI buses to detect when transactions stop completing, which "might" then indicate the bus has locked up.

Note that I only say "might", the AXI spec doesn't state that a transaction must complete within a defined number of cycles, so the number of cycles you choose to indicate possible lock up would depend on what your masters and slaves normally take to complete transfers.

So this counting of cycles from valid being driven high to when ready is then sampled high and the transfer handshake completes could be implemented by a hardware block (some sort of watchdog timer) if you were worried about possible lock ups, and I guess you could also implement this in software.

JD