[PATCH 0/6] tty: serial: propagate errors from uart_ops.pm callback

[Praveen Talari]

HI Jiri

On 09-07-2026 12:23, Jiri Slaby wrote:
> On 09. 07. 26, 8:25, Praveen Talari wrote:
>> The uart_ops.pm callback has been declared void since its introduction,
>> which means any error from a driver's power management implementation is
>> silently discarded by uart_change_pm(). Beyond losing the error
>> information, uart_change_pm() unconditionally updates state->pm_state
>> even when the underlying hardware transition failed. This causes the
>> serial core to track a power state that does not reflect reality:
>> subsequent calls to uart_change_pm() see the stale cached state as
>> matching the requested state and skip the callback entirely, leaving the
>> hardware permanently stuck with no further recovery attempt.
>>
>> On modern platforms where the .pm callback performs real work —
>> enabling clock trees, interacting with runtime PM, asserting voltage
>> regulators — this is a correctness gap. Failures are invisible to the
>> PM framework, the port proceeds to call ops->startup() on potentially
>> unpowered hardware, and suspend/resume errors are hidden from the core
>> that needs to handle them.
>>
>> This series fixes the problem in four steps:
>>
>>    Patch 1 changes the uart_ops.pm callback signature from void to int,
>>    updates uart_change_pm() to propagate errors and only commit
>>    state->pm_state on success, and handles the return value at every
>>    call site in serial_core.c with appropriate policy per context
>>    (propagate, log, or skip-on-failure).
>
> So does this break build without the below applied? IOW: breaks 
> bisectability?

You are right, patch 1 alone breaks the build since the driver 
implementations are still void until patches 2–4. The series as 
structured is not bisect-safe.

Do you have any suggestions on how to fix this issue?

>
>>    Patch 2 updates the 8250 driver family: serial8250_do_pm() and
>>    serial8250_pm() are updated to return int (with the exported symbol
>>    declaration updated in serial_8250.h), and the 8250 sub-driver
>>    pm callbacks are updated to return 0.
>>
>>    Patch 3 updates the remaining non-8250 serial drivers. All .pm
>>    implementations are updated to return 0. The sh-sci forward
>>    declaration shared with rsci is also updated.
>>
>>    Patch 4 updates arch-level implementations: SA1100 (assabet, h3xxx),
>>    OMAP1/ams-delta (modem_pm, now propagates regulator errors), and
>>    MIPS/Alchemy (alchemy_8250_pm).
>>
>> All existing .pm implementations return 0, so there is no functional
>> change for any current driver. The series purely adds the infrastructure
>> for drivers to report errors going forward, with the serial core ready
>> to handle them correctly.
>
> OK, now I miss the rationale behind the patchset. Neither there is a 
> possible code path to actually test this?
The rationale is that qcom_geni_serial_pm() calls 
pm_runtime_resume_and_get() which can fail, but its return value is 
currently discarded because the callback is void. Patch 6 in this series 
is the concrete user: it makes qcom_geni_serial_pm() propagate the 
pm_runtime_resume_and_get() error so that a failure to resume the UART 
power domain is visible at uart_port_startup() time rather than silently 
proceeding to call ops->startup() on an unpowered port.

A code path to test: on qcom platforms with CONFIG_SERIAL_QCOM_GENI 
enabled, if pm_runtime_resume_and_get() fails during 
uart_configure_port() or uart_port_startup(), the error now propagates 
to the caller instead of being dropped. The test case from development 
was injecting a failure in qcom_geni_serial_pm() and observing that 
uart_add_one_port() returns an error rather than proceeding silently.

Thanks,

Praveen Talari

>
> thanks,