Re: [RFC PATCH 3/4] tty: serial: 8250 core: add runtime pm

From: Tony Lindgren
Date: Wed Jul 09 2014 - 07:17:35 EST


* One Thousand Gnomes <gnomes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [140707 06:22]:
> On Fri, 4 Jul 2014 18:34:10 +0200
> Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <bigeasy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > While comparing the OMAP-serial and the 8250 part of this I noticed that
> > the the latter does not use runtime-pm.
>
> Yes it does, but 8250 parts (generally - omap presumably is special
> here ?) need to be powered on to transmit/receive not just for register
> access. The core uart layer implements a "pm" operation for this.

At least for omaps the UARTs need to be idled for the SoC to
hit off-idle where the SoC is powered off and rebooted during
idle.

So we can certainly enable this in a generic way, however, this
can only be done under the following conditions:

1. We can save and restore the serial register context and detect
when context was lost in the serial driver. The context loss
can be detected by looking at some registers that are only
initialized during init.

2. There's a way for the serial RX pin to wake the SoC. On some
omaps there's a separate pin specific wake-up interrupt that
can be used for that.

3. The serial PM features must be only enabled if requested by
the user via sysfs. Typically extra latency and loss of the
first RX character occur which is not acceptable to most
applications.

Regards,

Tony
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