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Subject: Re: [PATCH] hvc_console: returning 0 from put_chars is not an error
From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
To: Scott Wood <scottwood@freescale.com>
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Date: Sat, 17 Oct 2009 05:03:24 +1100
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On Fri, 2009-10-16 at 10:33 -0500, Scott Wood wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 03:46:45PM +1100, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> > On Thu, 2009-10-15 at 13:57 -0500, Scott Wood wrote:
> > > I'd say the dropping approach is quite undesirable (significant 
> > > potential for output loss unless the buffer is huge), unless there's 
> > > simply no way to safely spin.  Hopefully there are no such backends, but 
> > > if there are perhaps we can have them return some special code to 
> > > indicate that.
> > 
> > Should never spin.
> 
> Why is a hypervisor console different than a serial port in this regard?

Ah sorry, yeah, struct console can I suppose, it's the tty that
shouldn't.

> > Best is to keep a copy in the upper layer of the pending data and throttle
> > (not accept further data from tty layer) until we have managed to flush
> > out that "pending" buffer.
> 
> The data isn't coming from the tty layer -- we're talking about printk.  How
> do you throttle that without spinning?
> 
> I agree that it shouldn't spin when handling tty I/O.

Ben.