[PATCH 0/5] serial, Malta: Fixes to magic multipliers for SMSC Super I/O UARTs

From: Maciej W. Rozycki
Date: Thu Jun 10 2021 - 14:38:26 EST


Hi,

I've noticed our Malta platform serial driver does not take advantage of
support for the special UART divisor values for the bit rates of 230400
and 460800 bits per second its SMSC FDC37M817 Super I/O hardware provides.

Our 8250 core provides for these divisors via the UPF_MAGIC_MULTIPLIER
flag, so I thought it would be a straightforward platform change, but it
has turned out that the flag has AFAICT never worked (I wonder how people
test those things). The only platform currently in our tree that sets the
flag uses it for a different purpose.

I've fixed UPF_MAGIC_MULTIPLIER handling then in our 8250 core, added
reporting so that people have a chance to know the rates are supported and
then added the flag to Malta platform initialisers for Super I/O UARTs.
I have examined YAMON sources to verify that we don't have to enable the
special UART divisor values ourselves. See individual change descriptions
for further details.

Verified with a WTI CPM-800 site manager device which supports bit rates
of up to 230400bps. Also verified at 230400bps and 460800bps with an
EXSYS EX-44072 option card under Linux, based on the Oxford Semiconductor
OXPCIe952 device in its native mode; our clock settings are however off
enough for OxSemi PCIe devices for the former data rate only just working
and the latter making transmission go out of sync with data corruption
resulting. Another patch series to fix OxSemi handling bugs follows then.

Verification of the OxSemi patch series actually revealed an interesting
peculiarity of the SMSC Super I/O IC that contradicts SMSC documentation.
I have added a clarification as 1/5 of this patch series, originally meant
to contain four patches only. This has been confirmed both with the Malta
board concerned here and my old x86 server, which also has a similar SMSC
Super I/O part, although with high-speed operation not enabled by the
BIOS.

NB occasional input overruns were observed at 460800bps (with a MIPS 5Kc
@160MHz running this Malta), which could be eliminated by lowering the
`rx_trig_bytes' parameter to 4 from the default of 8 (the UART core in the
FDC37M817 has a 16-byte FIFO), via sysfs. Perhaps it would make sense to
change the default, at least for the higher-speed ports?

Please apply.

Maciej