Bug 25360

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User-Agent: Mozilla/4.75 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.2.16-22 i686)


pilot-link reports "Weird packet" errors during transfers, causing failed
sync, backup, restore, etc.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Hook up a Palm with a fair amount of "stuff" installed to serial port
on PC
2.  export PILOTPORT=/dev/ttyS0
3.  export PILOTRATE=115200
4.  pilot-xfer -b test_backup_dir
	

Actual Results:  Transfer fails (after some objects completed) with "Weird
packet" error message.

Expected Results:  Transfer should have completed successfully.

This can *sometimes* (but not always) be avoided by using a VERY slow
serial rate, e.g., 9600.
This did not happen with earlier versions of Red Hat Linux.  Some people
claim that the
newer kernel versions have different serial port handling that causes the
problem, but no one
on the mailing list seems to have any definitive information on what
changed or how to fix it.

Jurgen Stuber has a patch which adds better error recovery to pilot-xfer,
thus allowing it to recover from this problem and complete transfers
successfully.  I've verified that it works consistently for me even at
115200
bps.  The patch is available on his web page:

http://www.mpi-sb.mpg.de/~juergen/palm/

Discussion of the problem occurred back in October 1999, and can be seen in
the
mailing list archives (search for weird):

http://hcirisc.cs.binghamton.edu/pipermail/pilot-unix/1999-September/thread.html