[PATCH 10/10] drivers: PL011: add support for the ARM SBSA generic UART

Mark Rutland mark.rutland at arm.com
Fri Jan 16 10:12:39 PST 2015


On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 06:07:42PM +0000, Andre Przywara wrote:
> Hi Mark,
> 
> On 16/01/15 17:34, Mark Rutland wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 05:23:06PM +0000, Andre Przywara wrote:
> >> The ARM Server Base System Architecture[1] document describes a
> >> generic UART which is a subset of the PL011 UART.
> >> It lacks DMA support, baud rate control and modem status line
> >> control, among other things.
> >> The idea is to move the UART initialization and setup into the
> >> firmware (which does this job today already) and let the kernel just
> >> use the UART for sending and receiving characters.
> >> We use the recent refactoring the build a new struct uart_ops
> >> variable which points to some new functions avoiding access to the
> >> missing registers. We reuse as much existing PL011 code as possible.
> >>
> >> In contrast to the PL011 the SBSA UART does not define any AMBA or
> >> PrimeCell relations, so we go a pretty generic probe function
> >> which only uses platform device functions.
> >> A DT binding is provided, but other systems can easily attach to it,
> >> too (hint, hint!).
> >>
> >> Signed-off-by: Andre Przywara <andre.przywara at arm.com>
> >> ---
> >>  .../devicetree/bindings/serial/arm_sbsa_uart.txt   |    9 ++
> >>  drivers/tty/serial/amba-pl011.c                    |  154 ++++++++++++++++++++
> >>  2 files changed, 163 insertions(+)
> >>  create mode 100644 Documentation/devicetree/bindings/serial/arm_sbsa_uart.txt
> >>
> >> diff --git a/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/serial/arm_sbsa_uart.txt b/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/serial/arm_sbsa_uart.txt
> >> new file mode 100644
> >> index 0000000..21d211f
> >> --- /dev/null
> >> +++ b/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/serial/arm_sbsa_uart.txt
> >> @@ -0,0 +1,9 @@
> >> +* ARM SBSA defined generic UART
> >> +This UART uses a subset of the PL011 registers and consequently lives
> >> +in the PL011 driver. It's baudrate and other communication parameters
> >> +cannot be adjusted at runtime, so it lacks a clock specifier here.
> >> +
> >> +Required properties:
> >> +- compatible: must be "arm,sbsa-uart"
> >> +- reg: exactly one register range
> >> +- interrupts: exactly one interrupt specifier
> >> diff --git a/drivers/tty/serial/amba-pl011.c b/drivers/tty/serial/amba-pl011.c
> >> index a1c929f..596e641 100644
> >> --- a/drivers/tty/serial/amba-pl011.c
> >> +++ b/drivers/tty/serial/amba-pl011.c
> >> @@ -101,6 +101,14 @@ static struct vendor_data vendor_arm = {
> >>  	.get_fifosize		= get_fifosize_arm,
> >>  };
> >>  
> >> +static struct vendor_data vendor_sbsa = {
> >> +	.oversampling		= false,
> >> +	.dma_threshold		= false,
> >> +	.cts_event_workaround	= false,
> >> +	.always_enabled		= true,
> >> +	.fixed_options		= "115200n8",
> >> +};
> > 
> > Is this configuration mandated by the SBSA? If so, please mandate it in
> > the binding document.
> 
> No, actually it is just a placeholder. The driver needs some values to
> avoid querying the device and to make the upper levels happy, so I went
> with those. Actually 38400 would make more sense here, since that is
> some kind of Linux serial default value.

Please let's have the real values rather than something made up.

If I ask my UART how it's configured, I expect it to tell me the truth.
It's nice to know before I connect something to the other end of the
line.

> > If the rate and so on are not mandated, they should probably be
> > described by the binding so software has a chance of getting the real
> > configuration details.
> 
> What the actual settings are is actually totally up to the firmware. By
> definition software cannot learn these settings and it shouldn't care,
> as the SBSA UART is just "meant to work(TM)". Though from userland it
> looks like one can change the baudrate and the other parameters, the
> driver totally ignores those settings (though it reflects it back).

The fact that we cannot reconfigure it is orthogonal.

Given that all we should need is baud-rate, parity, and bits, it should
be relatively easy to describe and handle.

Mark.



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