[PATCH] serial: 8250: Fix THRE flag usage for CAP_MINI

Eric Anholt eric at anholt.net
Tue Jun 27 15:36:36 PDT 2017


Phil Elwell <phil at raspberrypi.org> writes:

> The BCM2835 MINI UART has non-standard THRE semantics. Conventionally
> the bit means that the FIFO is empty (although there may still be a
> byte in the transmit register), but on 2835 it indicates that the FIFO
> is not full. This causes interrupts after every byte is transmitted,
> with the FIFO providing some interrupt latency tolerance.
>
> A consequence of this difference is that the usual strategy of writing
> multiple bytes into the TX FIFO after checking THRE once is unsafe.
> In the worst case of 7 bytes in the FIFO, writing 8 bytes loses all
> but the first since by then the FIFO is full.
>
> There is an HFIFO ("Hidden FIFO") capability that causes the transmit
> loop to terminate when both THRE and TEMT are set, i.e. when the TX
> block is completely idle. This is unnecessarily cautious, potentially
> causing gaps in transmission.
>
> Add a new conditional to the transmit loop, predicated on CAP_MINI,
> that exits when THRE is no longer set (the FIFO is full). This allows
> the FIFO to fill quickly but subsequent writes are paced by the
> transmission rate.
>
> Signed-off-by: Phil Elwell <phil at raspberrypi.org>

Confirmed the hw behavior, so as far as the platform goes,

Acked-by: Eric Anholt <eric at anholt.net>
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