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The API and code have been through various bits of initial review by
serial driver people but they definitely need to live somewhere for a
while so the unconverted drivers can get knocked into shape, existing
drivers that have been updated can be better tuned and bugs whacked out.
This replaces the tty flip buffers with kmalloc objects in rings. In the
normal situation for an IRQ driven serial port at typical speeds the
behaviour is pretty much the same, two buffers end up allocated and the
kernel cycles between them as before.
When there are delays or at high speed we now behave far better as the
buffer pool can grow a bit rather than lose characters. This also means
that we can operate at higher speeds reliably.
For drivers that receive characters in blocks (DMA based, USB and
especially virtualisation) the layer allows a lot of driver specific
code that works around the tty layer with private secondary queues to be
removed. The IBM folks need this sort of layer, the smart serial port
people do, the virtualisers do (because a virtualised tty typically
operates at infinite speed rather than emulating 9600 baud).
Finally many drivers had invalid and unsafe attempts to avoid buffer
overflows by directly invoking tty methods extracted out of the innards
of work queue structs. These are no longer needed and all go away. That
fixes various random hangs with serial ports on overflow.
The other change in here is to optimise the receive_room path that is
used by some callers. It turns out that only one ldisc uses receive room
except asa constant and it updates it far far less than the value is
read. We thus make it a variable not a function call.
I expect the code to contain bugs due to the size alone but I'll be
watching and squashing them and feeding out new patches as it goes.
Because the buffers now dynamically expand you should only run out of
buffering when the kernel runs out of memory for real. That means a lot of
the horrible hacks high performance drivers used to do just aren't needed any
more.
Description:
tty_insert_flip_char is an old API and continues to work as before, as does
tty_flip_buffer_push() [this is why many drivers dont need modification]. It
does now also return the number of chars inserted
There are also
tty_buffer_request_room(tty, len)
which asks for a buffer block of the length requested and returns the space
found. This improves efficiency with hardware that knows how much to
transfer.
and tty_insert_flip_string_flags(tty, str, flags, len)
to insert a string of characters and flags
For a smart interface the usual code is
len = tty_request_buffer_room(tty, amount_hardware_says);
tty_insert_flip_string(tty, buffer_from_card, len);
More description!
At the moment tty buffers are attached directly to the tty. This is causing a
lot of the problems related to tty layer locking, also problems at high speed
and also with bursty data (such as occurs in virtualised environments)
I'm working on ripping out the flip buffers and replacing them with a pool of
dynamically allocated buffers. This allows both for old style "byte I/O"
devices and also helps virtualisation and smart devices where large blocks of
data suddenely materialise and need storing.
So far so good. Lots of drivers reference tty->flip.*. Several of them also
call directly and unsafely into function pointers it provides. This will all
break. Most drivers can use tty_insert_flip_char which can be kept as an API
but others need more.
At the moment I've added the following interfaces, if people think more will
be needed now is a good time to say
int tty_buffer_request_room(tty, size)
Try and ensure at least size bytes are available, returns actual room (may be
zero). At the moment it just uses the flipbuf space but that will change.
Repeated calls without characters being added are not cumulative. (ie if you
call it with 1, 1, 1, and then 4 you'll have four characters of space. The
other functions will also try and grow buffers in future but this will be a
more efficient way when you know block sizes.
int tty_insert_flip_char(tty, ch, flag)
As before insert a character if there is room. Now returns 1 for success, 0
for failure.
int tty_insert_flip_string(tty, str, len)
Insert a block of non error characters. Returns the number inserted.
int tty_prepare_flip_string(tty, strptr, len)
Adjust the buffer to allow len characters to be added. Returns a buffer
pointer in strptr and the length available. This allows for hardware that
needs to use functions like insl or mencpy_fromio.
Signed-off-by: Alan Cox <alan@redhat.com>
Cc: Paul Fulghum <paulkf@microgate.com>
Signed-off-by: Hirokazu Takata <takata@linux-m32r.org>
Signed-off-by: Serge Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Jeff Dike <jdike@addtoit.com>
Signed-off-by: John Hawkes <hawkes@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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The idea of this patch is to lock both sides of a ptmx/pty pair during line
discipline changing. This is needed to ensure that say a poll on one side of
the pty doesn't occur while the line discipline is actively being changed.
This resulted in an oops reported on lkml, see:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=111342171410005&w=2
A 'hacky' approach was previously implmemented which served to eliminate the
poll vs. line discipline changing race. However, this patch takes a more
general approach to the issue. The patch only adds locking on a less often
used path, the line-discipline changing path, as opposed to locking the
ptmx/pty pair on read/write/poll paths.
The patch below, takes both ldisc locks in either order b/c the locks are both
taken under the same spinlock(). I thought about locking the ptmx/pty
separately, such as master always first but that introduces a 3 way deadlock.
For example, process 1 does a blocking read on the slave side. Then, process
2 does an ldisc change on the slave side, which acquires the master ldisc lock
but not the slave's. Finally, process 3 does a write which blocks on the
process 2's ldisc reference.
This patch does introduce some changes in semantics. For example, a line
discipline change on side 'a' of a ptmx/pty pair, will now wait for a
read/write to complete on the other side, or side 'b'. The current behavior
is to simply wait for any read/writes on only side 'a', not both sides 'a' and
'b'. I think this behavior makes sense, but I wanted to point it out.
I've tested the patch with a bunch of read/write/poll while changing the line
discipline out from underneath.
This patch obviates the need for the above "hide the problem" patch.
Signed-off-by: Jason Baron <jbaron@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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