Re: [PATCH v2 0/9] Serial slave device bus

From: msuchanek
Date: Thu Jan 19 2017 - 20:37:40 EST


On 2017-01-16 23:54, Rob Herring wrote:
Here's a new version of the serdev bus support with all the review
feedback so far incorporated. I've left it named serdev for now pending
any further votes one way or the other, but I did rename the sysfs visible
portions to "serial".

There's still some discussion about what to do with devices that pass thru
data to userspace unmodified like GPS and could still use tty device for
the data path. IMO, we should treat this as a separate problem following
this series. Drivers we want to convert to serdev and already in the
kernel don't need this functionality.

The whole point of the serial bus is to simplify and clean up support for
serial devices.
If tty users cannot use the kernel support for automagic kill
switches/resets/whatever with kernel GPIO or whatever framework and must
continue supporting userspace GPIO and hacks for writing IO space from
userland for their devices there is just no point.

I mean it's fine to add support for your single pet device but if you are
to support non-trivial number of devices they don't get all perfect kernel
driver overnight. And if you need userspace GPIO for half of your devices
you can just continue using it for all to *simplify* your userspace code.

It has already happened for SPI devices and the implementation of the
userspace access to SPI is dragging for years.

Thanks

Michal