On Tue, Mar 22, 2022 at 04:59:24PM -0400, Sean Anderson wrote:
This adds a serial driver which uses semihosting calls to read and write to the host's console. For convenience, if CONFIG_DM_SERIAL is enabled, we will instantiate a serial driver. This allows users to enable this driver (which has no physical device) without modifying their device trees or board files. We also implement a non-DM driver for SPL, or for much faster output in U-Boot proper.
There are three ways to print to the console:
Method Baud ================== ===== smh_putc in a loop 170 smh_puts 1600 smh_write with :tt 20000 ================== =====
These speeds were measured using a 175 character message with a J-Link adapter. For reference, U-Boot typically prints around 2700 characters during boot on this board. There are two major factors affecting the speed of these functions. First, each breakpoint incurs a delay. Second, each debugger memory transaction incurs a delay. smh_putc has a breakpoint and memory transaction for every character. smh_puts has one breakpoint, but still has to use a transaction for every character. This is because we don't know the length up front, so OpenOCD has to check if each character is nul. smh_write has only one breakpoint and one memory transfer.
DM serial drivers can only implement a putc interface, so we are stuck with the slowest API. Non-DM drivers can implement puts, which is vastly more efficient. When the driver starts up, we try to open :tt. Since this is an extension, this may fail. If it does, we fall back to smh_puts. We don't check :semihosting-features, since there are nonconforming implementations (OpenOCD) which don't implement it (but *do* implement :tt).
Some semihosting implementations (QEMU) don't handle READC properly. To work around this, we try to use open/read (much like for stdin) if possible.
There is no non-blocking I/O available, so we don't implement pending. This will cause __serial_tstc to always return true. If CONFIG_SERIAL_RX_BUFFER is enabled, _serial_tstc will try and read characters forever. To avoid this, we depend on this config being disabled.
Signed-off-by: Sean Anderson sean.anderson@seco.com Reviewed-by: Simon Glass sjg@chromium.org
Applied to u-boot/next, thanks!