even while the bottom field is still being DMAed. Given all of the above, if one gets into a situation where bttv_irq_next_video() gets entered when the first available buffer has been pre-associated as a bottom field, then the function is going to process the buffers out of order. That first available buffer will be put into the bottom field slot and the buffer after that will be put into the top field slot. Problem is, since the top field is always processed first by the driver, then that second buffer (the one after the first available buffer) will be the first one to be finished. Because of the strict fifo handling of all video buffers, then that top field won't be seen by the app until after the bottom field is also processed. Worse still, the app will get back the chronologically later bottom field first, *before* the top field is received. The buffer's timestamps will even be backwards. While not fatal to most TV apps, this behavior can subtlely degrade userspace deinterlacing (probably will cause jitter). That's probably why it has gone unnoticed. But it will also cause serious problems if the app in question discards all but the latest received buffer (a latency minimizing tactic) - causing one field to only ever be displayed since the other is now always late. Unfortunately once you get into this state, you're stuck this way - because having consumed two buffers, now the next time around the "first" available buffer will again be a bottom field and the same thing happens. How can we get into this state? In a perfect world, where there's always a few free buffers queued to the driver, it should be impossible. However if something disrupts streaming, e.g. if the userspace app can't queue free buffers fast enough for a moment due perhaps to a CPU scheduling glitch, then the driver can get momentarily starved and some number of fields will be dropped. That's OK. But if an odd number of fields get dropped, then that "first" available buffer might be the bottom field and now we're stuck... This patch fixes that problem by deliberately only setting up a single field for one frame if we don't get a top field as the first available buffer. By purposely skipping the other field, then we only handle a single buffer thus bringing things back into proper sync (i.e. top field first) for the next frame. To do this we just drop the few lines in bttv_irq_next_video() that attempt to set up the second buffer when that second buffer isn't for the bottom field. This is definitely a problem in when in V4L2_FIELD_ALTERNATE mode. In the other modes this change either has no effect or doesn't harm things any further anyway. Signed-off-by: Mike Isely CC: stable@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Mauro Carvalho Chehab P