DMA write to SD card (SSP) doesn't write bytes

Question

I'm currently working on replacing a blocking busy-wait implementation of an SD card driver over SSP with a non-blocking DMA implementation. However, there are no bytes actually written, even though everything seems to go according to plan (no error conditions are ever found).

First some code (C++):

(Disclaimer: I'm still a beginner in embedded programming so code is probably subpar)

namespace SD {
    bool initialize() {
        //Setup SSP and detect SD card
        //... (removed since not relevant for question)

        //Setup DMA
        LPC_SC->PCONP |= (1UL << 29);
        LPC_GPDMA->Config = 0x01;
        //Enable DMA interrupts
        NVIC_EnableIRQ(DMA_IRQn);
        NVIC_SetPriority(DMA_IRQn, 4);
        //enable SSP interrupts
        NVIC_EnableIRQ(SSP2_IRQn);
        NVIC_SetPriority(SSP2_IRQn, 4);
    }

    bool write (size_t block, uint8_t const * data, size_t blocks) {
        //TODO: support more than one block
        ASSERT(blocks == 1);

        printf("Request sd semaphore (write)\n");
        sd_semaphore.take();
        printf("Writing to block " ANSI_BLUE "%d" ANSI_RESET "\n", block);

        memcpy(SD::write_buffer, data, BLOCKSIZE);


        //Start the write
        uint8_t argument[4];
        reset_argument(argument);
        pack_argument(argument, block);
        if (!send_command(CMD::WRITE_BLOCK, CMD_RESPONSE_SIZE::WRITE_BLOCK, response, argument)){
            return fail();
        }

        assert_cs();
        //needs 8 clock cycles
        delay8(1);

        //reset pending interrupts
        LPC_GPDMA->IntTCClear = 0x01 << SD_DMACH_NR;
        LPC_GPDMA->IntErrClr = 0x01 << SD_DMACH_NR;

        LPC_GPDMA->SoftSReq = SD_DMA_REQUEST_LINES;

        //Prepare channel
        SD_DMACH->CSrcAddr = (uint32_t)SD::write_buffer;
        SD_DMACH->CDestAddr = (uint32_t)&SD_SSP->DR;
        SD_DMACH->CLLI = 0;
        SD_DMACH->CControl = (uint32_t)BLOCKSIZE
                                             | 0x01 << 26 //source increment
                                             | 0x01 << 31; //Terminal count interrupt

        SD_SSP->DMACR = 0x02; //Enable ssp write dma

        SD_DMACH->CConfig = 0x1  //enable
                                            | SD_DMA_DEST_PERIPHERAL << 6
                                            | 0x1 << 11 //mem to peripheral
                                            | 0x1 << 14 //enable error interrupt
                                            | 0x1 << 15; //enable terminal count interrupt
        return true;
    }
}
extern "C" __attribute__ ((interrupt)) void DMA_IRQHandler(void) {
    printf("dma irq\n");
    uint8_t channelBit = 1 << SD_DMACH_NR;
    if (LPC_GPDMA->IntStat & channelBit) {
        if (LPC_GPDMA->IntTCStat & channelBit) {
            printf(ANSI_GREEN "terminal count interrupt\n" ANSI_RESET);
            LPC_GPDMA->IntTCClear = channelBit;
        }
        if (LPC_GPDMA->IntErrStat & channelBit) {
            printf(ANSI_RED "error interrupt\n" ANSI_RESET);
            LPC_GPDMA->IntErrClr = channelBit;
        }
        SD_DMACH->CConfig = 0;

        SD_SSP->IMSC = (1 << 3);

    }
}

extern "C" __attribute__ ((interrupt)) void SSP2_IRQHandler(void) {
    if (SD_SSP->MIS & (1 << 3)) {
        SD_SSP->IMSC &= ~(1 << 3);
        printf("waiting until idle\n");
        while(SD_SSP->SR & (1UL << 4));

        //Stop transfer token
        //I'm not sure if the part below up until deassert_cs is necessary.
        //Adding or removing it made no difference.
        SPI::send(0xFD);

        {
            uint8_t response;
            unsigned int timeout = 4096;
            do {
                response = SPI::receive();
            } while(response != 0x00 && --timeout);
            if (timeout == 0){
                deassert_cs();
                printf("fail");
                return;
            }
        }

        //Now wait until the device isn't busy anymore
        {
            uint8_t response;
            unsigned int timeout = 4096;
            do {
                response = SPI::receive();
            } while(response != 0xFF && --timeout);
            if (timeout == 0){
                deassert_cs();
                printf("fail");
                return;
            }
        }
        deassert_cs();
        printf("idle\n");
        SD::sd_semaphore.give_from_isr();
    }
}

A few remarks about the code and setup:

• Written for the lpc4088 with FreeRTOS
• All SD_xxx defines are conditional defines to select the right pins (I need to use SSP2 in my dev setup, SSP0 for the final product)
• All external function that are not defined in this snippet (e.g. pack_argument, send_command, semaphore.take() etc.) are known to be working correctly (most of these come from the working busy-wait SD implementation. I can't of course guarantee 100% that they are bugless, but they seem to be working right.).
• Since I'm in the process of debugging this there are a lot of printfs and hardcoded SSP2 variables. These are of course temporarily.
• I mostly used this as example code.

Now I have already tried the following things:

• Write without DMA using busy-wait over SSP. As mentioned before I started with a working implementation of this, so I know the problem has to be in the DMA implementation and not somewhere else.
• Write from mem->mem instead of mem->sd to eliminate the SSP peripheral. mem->mem worked fine, so the problem must be in the SSP part of the DMA setup.
• Checked if the ISRs are called. They are: first the DMA IRS is called for the terminal count interrupt, and then the SSP2 IRS is called. So the IRSs are (probably) setup correctly.
• Made a binary dump of the entire sd content to see if it the content might have been written to the wrong location. Result: the content send over DMA was not present anywhere on the SD card (I did this with any change I made to the code. None of it got the data on the SD card).
• Added a long (~1-2 seconds) timeout in the SSP IRS by repeatedly requesting bytes from the SD card to make sure that there wasn't a timeout issue (e.g. that I tried to read the bytes before the SD card had the chance to process everything). This didn't change the outcome at all.

Unfortunately due to lack of hardware tools I haven't been able yet to verify if the bytes are actually send over the data lines.

What is wrong with my code, or where can I look to find the cause of this problem? After spending way more hours on this then I'd like to admit I really have no idea how to get this working and any help is appreciated!

UPDATE: I did a lot more testing, and thus I got some more results. The results below I got by writing 4 blocks of 512 bytes. Each block contains constantly increasing numbers module 256. Thus each block contains 2 sequences going from 0 to 255. Results:

• Data is actually written to the SD card. However, it seems that the first block written is lost. I suppose there is some setup done in the write function that needs to be done earlier.

• The bytes are put in a very weird (and wrong) order: I basically get alternating all even numbers followed by all odd numbers. Thus I first get even numbers 0x00 - 0xFE and then all odd numbers 0x01 - 0xFF (total number of written bytes seems to be correct, with the exception of the missing first block). However, there's even one exception in this sequence: each block contains 2 of these sequences (sequence is 256 bytes, block is 512), but the first sequence in each block has 0xfe and 0xff "swapped". That is, 0xFF is the end of the even numbers and 0xFE is the end of the odd series. I have no idea what kind of black magic is going on here. Just in case I've done something dumb here's the snippet that writes the bytes:

  uint8_t block[512];
  for (int i = 0; i < 512; i++) {
      block[i] = (uint8_t)(i % 256);
  }
  if (!SD::write(10240, block, 1)) { //this one isn't actually written
      WARN("noWrite", proc);
  }
  if (!SD::write(10241, block, 1)) {
      WARN("noWrite", proc);
  }
  if (!SD::write(10242, block, 1)) {
      WARN("noWrite", proc);
  }
  if (!SD::write(10243, block, 1)) {
      WARN("noWrite", proc);
  }
  

And here is the raw binary dump. Note that this exact pattern is fully reproducible: so far each time I tried this I got this exact same pattern.

Update2: Not sure if it's relevant, but I use sdram for memory.

Answer 1

When I finally got my hands on a logic analyzer I got a lot more information and was able to solve these problems.

There were a few small bugs in my code, but the bug that caused this behaviour was that I didn't send the "start block" token (0xFE) before the block and I didn't send the 16 bit (dummy) crc after the block. When I added these to the transfer buffer everything was written successfully!

So this fix was as followed:

bool write (size_t block, uint8_t const * data, size_t blocks) {
    //TODO: support more than one block
    ASSERT(blocks == 1);

    printf("Request sd semaphore (write)\n");
    sd_semaphore.take();
    printf("Writing to block " ANSI_BLUE "%d" ANSI_RESET "\n", block);

    SD::write_buffer[0] = 0xFE; //start block

    memcpy(&SD::write_buffer[1], data, BLOCKSIZE);

    SD::write_buffer[BLOCKSIZE + 1] = 0; //dummy crc
    SD::write_buffer[BLOCKSIZE + 2] = 0;

    //...
}

As a side note, the reason why the first block wasn't written was simply because I didn't wait until the device was ready before sending the first block. Doing so fixed the problem.