Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] UART slave device bus

[Rob Herring <robh@kernel.org>]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 7:37 AM, Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de> wrote:
> On Wednesday, August 17, 2016 8:14:42 PM CEST Rob Herring wrote:
>>
>> Before I spend more time on this, I'm looking mainly for feedback on the
>> general direction and structure (the interface with the existing serial
>> drivers in particular).
>
> Aside from the things that have already been mentioned in the discussion,
> I wonder how this should relate to the drivers/input/serio framework.

As I mentioned, I did investigate that route.

> My impression is that there is some overlap in what you want
> to do here, and what serio does today as a line discipline on top
> of a tty line discipline (and on top of other non-uart serial
> connections), so we should look into whether the two can be unified
> or not. Here is what I found so far:
>
> For all I can tell, serio is only used for drivers/input/ but could
> easily be extended to other subsystems. It currently uses its own
> binary ID matching between drivers and devices through user space
> interfaces, though adding a DT binding for it would appear to be
> a good idea regardless.
>
> It also has a bus_type already, and with some operations defined on
> it. In particular, it has an "interrupt" method that is used to
> notify the client driver when a byte is available (and pass
> that byte along with it). This seems to be a useful addition to
> what you have. Since it is based on sending single characters
> both ways, transferring large amounts of data would be slower,
> but the interface is somewhat simpler. In principle, both
> character based and buffer based interfaces could coexist here
> as they do in some other interfaces (e.g. smbus).

Given that about the only things it really provided are the bus_type
and associated boilerplate without much of a client interface, it
seemed to me that creating a new subsystem first made more sense. Then
we can convert serio to use the new subsystem.

I agree we'll probably need a character at time interface, but for
initial targets a buffer based interface is what's needed.

> While serio is typically layered on top of tty-ldisc (on top of
> tty_port, which is often on top of uart_port) or on top of
> i8042/ps2 drivers, I suppose we could add another back-end on top
> of uart_port directly to avoid the ldisc configuration in many
> cases when using devicetree based setup. This should also address
> the main concern that Alan raised about generality of the
> subsystem: we'd always leave the option of either manual configuration
> of the tty-ldisc (for any tty_port) or configuring on-chip devices
> (using uart_port) directly through DT. Of course the same thing
> can be done if we hook into tty_port rather than uart_port.

There are also some uart drivers that register directly with serio.

I'm also thinking of using an ldisc backend as well as a way to move
forward with the slave drivers while tty_port rework is being done. Of
course that doesn't solve the fundamental problems with using an ldisc
already. Going the tty_port route is going take some time to
restructure things in the tty layer and require tree wide changes to
tty drivers.

Rob