Skip to content
Commit de4ed391 authored by Helmut Grohne's avatar Helmut Grohne Committed by Greg Kroah-Hartman
Browse files

serial: xuartps: reduce hardware TX race condition

After sending data to the uart, the driver was waiting until the TX
FIFO was empty (for every single char written). After that, TX was
disabled by writing the original TX state to the status register. At
that time however, the state machine could still be shifting
characters. Not waiting can result in strange hardware states,
especially when coupled with calls to cdns_uart_set_termios, whose
symptom generally is garbage characters being received from uart or a
hang.

According to UG585, the TACTIVE bit of the channel status register
indicates the shifter operation and we should be waiting for that bit
to clear.

Sending characters does not require the TX FIFO to be empty, but merely
to not be full. So cdns_uart_console_putchar is updated accordingly.

During tests with an instrumented kernel and an oscilloscope, we could
determine that the chance of a race is reduced by this patch. It is not
removed entirely. On the oscilloscope, one can see that disabling the
transmitter early can result in the transmission hanging in the middle
of a character for a tiny duration. This hiccup is enough to
desynchronize with a remote device for a sequence of characters until a
data bit doesn't match the start or stop bits anymore.

Link: https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-serial/msg23156.html
Link: https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-serial/msg26139.html


Signed-off-by: default avatarHelmut Grohne <h.grohne@intenta.de>
Acked-by: default avatarSören Brinkmann <soren.brinkmann@xilinx.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
parent 68d12bb2
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment