On Monday, August 22, 2016 8:38:23 AM CEST Rob Herring wrote:

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 7:37 AM, Arnd Bergmann [off-list ref] wrote:

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On Wednesday, August 17, 2016 8:14:42 PM CEST Rob Herring wrote:

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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.

Ok, sorry for missing that.

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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.

One possible downside of merging later is that we end up having to
support the existing user space ABI for serio that may not fit well
within whatever we come up with independently.

I think there are two other valuable features provided by serio:

- an existing set of drivers written to the API
- the implementation of the tty_ldisc

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

I think what's more important than the 'character-at-a-time' interface
is the notification about new data. Maybe I missed how you handle that
today, but it seems that you can currently only handle polling
for data using a blocking read.

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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.

Right, I think this is done to have automatic probing for the keyboard,
rather than relying on the user space interface configuration.

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.

Would it make sense then to define a DT binding that can cover these
four cases independent of the Linux usage:

a) an existing tty line discipline matched to a tty port
b) a serio device using the N_MOUSE line discipline (which
   happens to cover non-mouse devices these days)
c) a uart_port slave attached directly to the uart (like in your
   current code)
d) the same slave drivers using a new tty line discipline

If we can handle all four, then at least we have some flexibility
with moving around or merging the Linux implementation later.

	Arnd