Return-Path: Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2016 18:09:10 +0100 From: One Thousand Gnomes To: "H. Nikolaus Schaller" Cc: Sebastian Reichel , Rob Herring , Greg Kroah-Hartman , Marcel Holtmann , Jiri Slaby , Pavel Machek , Peter Hurley , NeilBrown , Arnd Bergmann , Linus Walleij , "open list:BLUETOOTH DRIVERS" , "linux-serial@vger.kernel.org" , "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] UART slave device bus Message-ID: <20160821180910.51cf919d@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> In-Reply-To: References: <20160818011445.22726-1-robh@kernel.org> <20160818202900.hyvm4hfxedifuefn@earth> <20160819052125.ze5zilppwoe3f2lx@earth> <20160819120631.5fe2af0d@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> <61F43885-BE05-482C-9AD6-B52A2DA166B8@goldelico.com> <20160820142226.6121e76d@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII List-ID: > Let me ask a question about your centralized and pre-cooked buffering approach. > > As far as I see, even then the kernel API must notify the driver at the right moment > that a new block has arrived. Right? The low level driver queues words (data byte, flag byte) The buffer processing workqueue picks those bytes from the queue and atomically empties the queue The workqueue involves the receive handler. > But how does the kernel API know how long such a block is? It's as long as the data that has arrived in that time. > Usually there is a start byte/character, sometimes a length indicator, then payload data, > some checksum and finally a stop byte/character. For NMEA it is $, no length, * and \r\n. > For other serial protocols it might be AT, no length, and \r. Or something different. > HCI seems to use 2 byte op-code or 1 byte event code and 1 byte parameter length. It doesn't look for any kind of protocol block headers. The routine invoked by the work queue does any frame recovery. > So I would even conclude that you usually can't even use DMA based UART receive > processing for arbitrary and not well-defined protocols. Or have to assume that the We do, today for bluetooth and other protocols just fine - it's all about data flows not about framing in the protocol sense. Alan