Re: [PATCH 10/13] tty: serial: omap: remove some dead code

[NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>]

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On Thu, 24 Apr 2014 15:19:14 +0100 One Thousand Gnomes
<gnomes@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:

> > > But I don't have discrete hardware.  I have a bunch of stuff soldered onto a
> > > board with ad-hoc connections chosen to make the life of the hardware builder
> > > easy rather than chosen to make the life of the software developer easy
> > > (which I think is the correct choice).
> > > 
> > > So I need to tell DT "This device is plugged into this UART, and there is no
> > > DTR line, but when the UARTs DTR line would be asserted (if it had one), then
> > > I need that regulator of there turned on". or maybe "I need to toggle this
> > > GPIO  with exactly this pattern, while watching that GPIO to see if it is
> > > working".
> > > 
> > > So I thought:
> > > 
> > >  1/ give the UART a "virtual" DTR so it could drive any GPIO
> > >  2/ create a "gpio-to-regulator" driver which presented as a (virtual) gpio
> > >     and responded to state changes on that GPIO by turning on or off the
> > >     regulator
> > >  3/ create a dedicated driver which knows how to toggle the magic GPIO while
> > >     watching the other GPIO to convince the silly device to wakeup, or go to
> > >     sleep, as required, and have this appear as a (virtual) GPIO.
> 
> Unless you are using it as a "real' DTR line then I think this is the
> wrong approach. This problem actually is turning up in both PC class and
> ARM boxes now all over the place for three reasons I am seeing.
> 
> 1. We are getting a lot of hardware moving to serial attached
> bluetooth/gps/etc because of the power win. In addition ACPI can describe
> power relationships and what is on the other end of a UART embedded in
> the device
> 
> 2. We've got cheap hardware with modem lines being "retrofitted" via gpio
> 
> 3. There are a subset of devices that have extra control lines beyond the
> usual serial port ones. These range from additional control lines for
> things like smartcard programmers to port muxing.
> 
> > I have no problem either way, just that unused code doesn't have to be
> > sitting in the tree and I'm not entirely sure this GPIO should be
> > handled by omap-serial.c, perhaps something more generic inside
> > serial-core so other UART drivers can benefit from it.
> 
> serial-core provides power hooks. If the goal is that this comes on when
> you power up the uart and goes away on the last close then the hooks are
> there already.

Could you be a bit more explicit, or point to an example user of these hooks?

I had a quick look and I guess that uart_change_pm() is the most likely
candidate for what you are referring to.
I can see how that interfaces to the specific piece of uart hardware, such as
omap-serial.c
But I cannot see how you would plumb that though to the device that was
plugged in to the serial port.  I guess if that device could be registered as
a child of the omap_serial device, then power management inheritance might
come in to play, but I cannot see any way to tell a serial port that it has
some arbitrary child device.

So maybe I'm missing something.

>                  If its ldisc specific then the tty layer also calls the
> device on ldisc changes precisely so it can make hardware specific
> twiddles in such cases.
> 
> A set of gpios on the tty_port object would not go amiss and would also
> address the PC case.
> 
> > considering this is a BTUART device, why didn't you do this at the ldisc
> > level ? hci_uart_open() sounds like a good choice from a quick thinking.
> 
> ldiscs are hardware independent. Nothing about hardware belongs in an
> ldisc. Any ldisc should within reason work on any port.
> 
> What I propsed when it came up ages ago was to expose some gpio settings
> in the tty, to provide ways for them to be set by default and also ioctls
> to configure them. I still think this (but moved into the tty_port as its
> a persistent hardware property) is a good idea now that we are starting
> to see more use cases than weird dongles and muxes on pre-production
> reference boards.
> 
> With my tty and serial hat on I think a power gpio is a no-brainer even
> without doing the other work and therefore it should probably be described
> generically for a serial port in the DT as well as in the ACPI data. If
> you should also be able to give it a regulator to use as well that also
> seems to make complete sense.

In one case the "power on" sequence is substantially more complex that just a
gpio or regulator.  I would need to write a device driver for the (GPS) chip
which could receive a poweron/poweroff signal from the uart and do the
required magic.

Having serial-core know about gpios and regulators and random other stuff
seems wrong.
I would really like to see the "runtime interpreted power sequences" become a
real thing.  Then serial-core could activate a "RIPS", and that would have
the flexibility to do whatever is needed without adding complexity to
serial-core.
Using a virtual GPIO was my poor-mans RIPS.  Using gpiolib, and driver can
pretend to be a gpio so it is a simple "pipe" to send a power-on/power-off
signal over.

So ... with your "serial" hat on, if I were to write/test a patch to allow
any serial port to have a "power-gpio" described in DT and the gpio would be
driven in uart_change_pm(), would you consider accepting that patch, or did I
misunderstand?

Thanks,
NeilBrown

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