RapidIO: The Next Generation Communication Fabric For Embedded Application

2.13. MAINTENANCE AND ERROR MANAGEMENT

RapidIO steps beyond traditional bus-based interfaces by providing a rich set of maintenance and error management functions. These enable the initial system discovery, configuration, error detection and recovery mechanisms. A discovery mechanism with similarities to PCI is used to find devices in the system and configure them.

2.13.1. Maintenance

A maintenance operation is supported by all RapidIO devices and is used to access predefined maintenance registers within each device. The registers contain information about the device and its capabilities. Also included are error detection and status registers such as watchdog timer settings. For more complex error situations, such as a failing component, software may make use of these registers to recover or shut down a RapidIO device.

2.13.2. System Discovery

Through the use of the maintenance operation, a RapidIO host may traverse a system and configure each device in the network. Since RapidIO allows complex system topologies such as meshes, a mechanism is provided so that the host can determine if it has been to a node before. For high-reliability applications, RapidIO allows more than one host to configure the machine.

2.13.3. Error Coverage

The mean time between failure (MTBF) and mean time to repair (MTTR) of a system are often critical considerations in embedded infrastructure applications. In these systems reliable packet delivery is required. It is intolerable for an error to go undetected ...