Serial port monitoring with keyboard LEDs

Serial port monitoring with keyboard LEDs

[jbradford]

Hi,

I'm trying to add code to use the keyboard LEDs as serial port Tx/Rx LEDs, somwehat analogous to an external modem, (I.E. for links to things other than modems, that typically don't have LEDs).

I'm using a 2.4.19 kernel as a reference, and looking at putting my code in /drivers/char/serial.c, specifically at the serial_in and serial_out functions, is this the Right Thing or not?  Obviously the LEDs won't actually reflect what is going out on the serial line, because of buffering, etc, and also, what's going to be more useful - just flash on and off for each byte sent, or LED on for 1, LED off for 0 bit?  That would be even more of an approximation to what's actually happening on the serial line, because obviously we're sending a byte at a time to the serial port.

Any pointers to docs I should read would be appreicated :-)

John.

Re: Serial port monitoring with keyboard LEDs

[Brad Hards]

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On Sun, 22 Sep 2002 07:06, jbradford@dial.pipex.com wrote:
> I'm using a 2.4.19 kernel as a reference, and looking at putting my code in
> /drivers/char/serial.c, specifically at the serial_in and serial_out
> functions, is this the Right Thing or not?  Obviously the LEDs won't
> actually reflect what is going out on the serial line, because of
> buffering, etc, and also, what's going to be more useful - just flash on
> and off for each byte sent, or LED on for 1, LED off for 0 bit?  That would
> be even more of an approximation to what's actually happening on the serial
> line, because obviously we're sending a byte at a time to the serial port.
Not sure about the serial code. 

However you can't update the keyboard LEDs at anything like normal serial port 
rates. And even if you could update at 10kHz, you just varied the brightness, 
rather than caused any real "blinking"

> Any pointers to docs I should read would be appreicated :-)
You are going to cause problems. There are other users of keyboard LEDs in the 
kernel (eg for notifying of an oops). It isn't looking too good.

If you are really intent on doing this, you can probably manage this from 
userspace, using the event interface and the application that is sending data 
over the serial interface. Of course, you'd need to have a suitable keyboard 
(probably only USB or ADB in 2.4.x).

Brad

- -- 
http://conf.linux.org.au. 22-25Jan2003. Perth, Australia. Birds in Black.
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