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path: root/drivers/char/pty.c
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2006-01-10[PATCH] TTY layer buffering revampAlan Cox
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>
2005-09-09[PATCH] pty_chars_in_buffer oops fixJason Baron
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>
2005-04-16Linux-2.6.12-rc2Linus Torvalds
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history, even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about 3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good infrastructure for it. Let it rip!