Em Sun, 3 Sep 2017 22:05:23 +0200
Honza Petrouš <jpetr...@gmail.com> escreveu:

> > There is still a gap at the CA API, as there are three ioctls that are used
> > only by a few drivers and whose structs are not properly documented:
> > CA_GET_MSG, CA_SEND_MSG and CA_SET_DESCR.
> >
> > The first two ones seem to be related to a way that a few drivers
> > provide to send/receive messages.  
> 
> I never seen usage of such R/W ioctls, all drivers I have access to
> are using read()/write() variant of communication.

Yeah, the normal usage is to use R/W syscalls.

> BTW, I just remembered dvblast app, part of videolan.org:
> 
> http://www.videolan.org/projects/dvblast.html
> 
> which is using CA_GET_MSG/CA_SEND_MSG:
> 
> https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dvblast/blob/master/en50221.c

>From the ca_msg struct:

        /* a message to/from a CI-CAM */
        struct ca_msg {
                unsigned int index;
                unsigned int type;
                unsigned int length;
                unsigned char msg[256];
        };

It only uses length and msg fields. Describing those seem
quite obvious. However, what "index" and "type" means?

Within the Kernel, only two drivers implement it:

        $ git grep -l ca_msg drivers/
        drivers/media/firewire/firedtv-ci.c
        drivers/media/pci/bt8xx/dst_ca.c

At the dst_ca driver, checking for those fields don't give any
useful result:
        $ grep index drivers/media/pci/bt8xx/dst_ca.c
        (nothing)
        $ grep type drivers/media/pci/bt8xx/dst_ca.c
        // Copy application_type, application_manufacturer and manufacturer_code
        p_ca_caps->slot_type = 1;
        p_ca_caps->descr_type = 1;
                p_ca_slot_info->type = CA_CI;
                p_ca_slot_info->type = CA_CI;

(btw, using "1" for slot_type and descr_type there seems a very bad
thing)

The code at ca_get_message(), handle_dst_tag(), ca_set_pmt(), etc also
doesn't seem to be using neither one of those fields.

The same happens at firedtv-ci: it also doesn't seem to be using
none of those fields.

It should be noticed that, the dst_ca seems to allow more than one
descrambler:

        p_ca_caps->descr_num = slot_cap[7];

Yet, the index is not used. So, it doesn't seem to be related to
the descrambler index (or there's an implementation bug there - and
at dvblast - as none uses it).

What *I* suspect is that this were meant to be used for either
CA index/type or DESCR index/type, but, when this got implemented,
people discovered that this would be useless and never actually
used those fields. Yet, I may be completely wrong and those were
added to mean something else.

If so, then we could just change the struct to:

        struct ca_msg {
                unsigned int reserved[2];
                unsigned int length;
                unsigned char msg[256];
        };

And document just length and msg.

Thanks,
Mauro
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