[PATCH 0/3] minitty: a minimal TTY layer alternative for embedded systems

[Ard Biesheuvel]

On 24 March 2017 at 13:53, Greg Kroah-Hartman
<gregkh at linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 08:31:45AM -0400, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
>> On Fri, 24 Mar 2017, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
>>
>> > meta-comment, any reason you didn't cc: linux-serial at vger as well?
>>
>> I didn't realize such a list even existed. I looked up "TTY LAYER" in
>> the maintainer file.
>
> Ah, didn't notice the list wasn't included there, I'll go fix that...
>
>> > Again, I like the idea, but worry that with this change, we would have
>> > two different tty layers we have to maintain for the next 20+ years, and
>> > we have a hard time keeping one stable and working today :)
>>
>> That's the crux of the argument: touching the current TTY layer is NOT
>> going to help keeping it stable. Here, not only I did remove features,
>> but the ones I kept were reimplemented to be much smaller and
>> potentially less scalable and performant too.  The ultimate goal here is
>> to have the smallest code possible with very simple locking and not
>> necessarily the most scalable code. That in itself is contradictory with
>> the regular TTY code and warrants a separate implementation. And because
>> it is so small, it is much easier to understand and much easier to
>> maintain.
>
> So, what you are really saying here is "the current tty layer is too
> messy, too complex, too big, and not understandable, so I'm going to
> route around it by rewriting the whole thing just for my single-use-case
> because I don't want to touch it."
>
> That's a horrid thing to do.
>
> Factoring things out is great.  Routing around the existing working code
> just because you want something "simpler" is not great.  Refactor and
> fix things up so you do understand it, because by ignoring it, you are
> going to end up making the same mistakes that have already been fixed
> with the existing 20+ years of tty layer development.
>
> So please, take what we have, refactor, and carve things up so that the
> _same_ code paths are being used for both "big and little" tty layers.
> That way _everyone_ benifits, no need to have totally separate code
> paths, and totally different files that different people maintain.
>

As I understand it, the memory saving is not only due to having less
code, but also due to the fact that functionality that exists as
distinct layers in the full featured TTY stack is collapsed into a
single layer, requiring substantially less memory for buffers.

I guess you could call collapsing layers like this 'routing around
it', but the point is that the reason for doing so is not that the
code is too complex or too big, but simply that the flexibility
offered by a deep stack is fundamentally irreconcilable with a shallow
one that is hardwired for a serial debug port.

>> Where code sharing made sense, I did factor out common parts already,
>> such as the baudrate handling. I intend to do the same to add job
>> control support.
>
> The first two patches were great, I like those.  Keep that work up, just
> make it so that a single line disipline attached to a serial port,
> without the pty stuff, works just fine and is tiny.  I don't see why
> that can't be possible.
>
> thanks,
>
> greg k-h
>
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