I have a task to write a serial driver for uart and tty_uart driver too on Zephyr (It's my first time in developing drivers).
1.So what is the difference between a serial driver and a tty driver?
Is there any interdependence relation between them? I mean to write a tty driver should I write by first a serial driver, that will be a base to the tty driver or what?
So what is the difference between a serial driver and a tty driver?
A serial driver makes no assumption about the kind of device attached, it merely sends and receives raw "bytes" (see note), and probably offers some way to configure the communication (which baud rate, how many data bits, what kind of parity scheme, what kind of flow control, etc). The device attached to the serial port could be a serial mouse, or a bar code scanner, or a printer, or ... - the serial driver doesn't care.
Note: "byte" might not be a synonym for "octet" - e.g. it could be a group of 7 bits.
A TTY driver is tied to the assumption that the device is an type writer with a keyboard. Note: For the history; before computers existed we went from "people waving flags at each other" (semaphores) to "morse code with a single key" (telegraph) to teleprinters/teletypewriter (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter ); and when computers got invented the (mechanical/electric) teleprinters were simply replaced with (computerized) dumb terminals.
Mostly; TTY is all about what bytes mean (and doesn't care much how the bytes are sent/received); and a serial driver is all about how bytes are sent/received (and doesn't care what the bytes mean).
Is there any interdependence relation between them? I mean to write a tty driver should I write by first a serial driver, that will be a base to the tty driver or what?
Crudely; a TTY driver has IO in 4 directions - getting key press info from local keyboard, sending bytes to remote whatever, receiving bytes from remote whatever, and putting characters on the local screen. For sending/receiving bytes with "remote whatever" you can use a serial driver; but (especially during development/testing) you could use anything else (TCP/IP stream, pipes, file IO, ...) instead - you don't necessarily need to implement the serial driver first.
Regarding your questions:
So what is the difference between a serial driver and a tty
driver? Is there any interdependence relation between them? I
mean to write a tty driver should I write by first a serial driver,
that will be a base to the tty driver or what?
It all depends on your operating system.
Previous answers relate mostly to Linux/Windows. You don't provide more points about it, but I'm assuming your question relates to Zephyr RTOS Project. I also assume you're developing a BSP for a custom board not yet fully supported by the RTOS.
The device driver model in Zephyr is different from Linux's or Window's driver models. You can take a look at the board porting guide and architecture porting guide.
The documentation contains a lot of samples, including quite a few of driver samples.
You'll also find more information here covering how to have access to support from the community.
Related
On my ARM system (Tegra based), I'm running the mainline linux kernel. It uses the device tree system.
I have enabled a hardware driver for the General-Memory-Bus (part of the SoC) in the .dts file by setting its status="okay". Recompiled the dtb and booted the kernel. But no device (/dev/xx) appears.
The driver is compiled into the kernel and can be seen by
cat /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/modules.builtin
The command
cat /sys/firmware/devicetree/base/<path to device>/status
returns "okay".
Do I need to make some kind of "mknod"?
What else is nessesary?
The traditional UNIX "stream of bytes" device model is a pretty high-level abstraction of most modern hardware, and as such there are plenty of drivers which do not create /dev entries for the devices they control largely because they don't fit that model. Bus drivers in particular are very much a case of that - they exist, but only for the sake of discovering and allowing access to the devices behind them; there is no /dev/sata that lets you interact with the actual host controller, sending out raw commands on any old port regardless of what's connected or not; there is no /dev/usb that lets you attempt arbitrary transfers to arbitrary endpoints which may or may not exist.
Furthermore, your typical 'external interface' controller as in this case is orders of magnitude less complex than an interface like SATA or USB - the 'device' itself is often little more than a register block controlling some clocks and a chip-select multiplexer. Even if the driver did create something you could interact with directly, there's not exactly much you could do with it.
The correct way to proceed in this situation is to describe your FPGA device in the DT as a child of the GMI bus, accurately reflecting the hardware, no less, then develop your own driver for that. The bus driver itself just sits transparently in the middle. And if you do want a quick and dirty way to get started by just reading and writing bus addresses directly, well, it's behind a memory-mapped I/O region; that's exactly what /dev/mem exists for.
I have an IMU that has a UART interface. The manufacturer has provided a Windows based program that get all the data from the IMU and displays it in real time. (The device is connected to the PC via the USB). I need to write my own software that does this in order to integrate it into my project.
The datasheet/manual for the IMU gives all details about which registers have to be written to and read from (issue commands and read responses) in order to get the IMU data. My question is, how do I implement this in C under Linux?
The closest information I found out was this one but when compiling it it seems I need Linux kernel headers since that program uses #include <linux/module.h> so I'm not sure if I am on the right track.
You need not any kernel headers to talk over a serial port with any device connected to that serial port.
You would get a 'connection' to your device by simply opening a file /dev/ttyUSB0 with open() call (the actual name could be found by looking into dmesg for relevant device messages or by looking what device node appears under /dev when you plug your device into usb port).
Then you would need to set the baud rate and the word format (number of bits, parity and number of stop bits). To achieve that from the user-space process you would use a set of ioctls. For details read man ioctl and man ioctl_list
My question is going to be rather vague but I will try to explain as detailed as I can what I am trying to resolve.
Trying to learn Linux kernel USB stack I have started to think of making a simple USB driver for my Atmel evaluation board based on ARM M0+ MCU to run away from Windows tools (Visual Studio plugin).
I have spent few days learning kernel's USB API and come to conclusion of how to make this. My driver aims to make my board connected to PC through USB cable act like a simple USB flash drive. Making that I then can easily program it with a new version of firmware written by me.
I have found that I need to find out specific interface (I am talking about interface in terms of USB specification, not interface we used to use as a code abstraction) that holds an endpoint (pipe) responsible for interaction with flash memory. And then I can map it to character device and interact with it using standard I/O operations that are described in struct file_operations structure.
Simply using cat on /proc/* file descriptor that was created by USB Core subsystem I have investigated that interface responsible for interaction with flash memory holds bulk endpoint (likewise, this terms come from USB specification, CMIIAW) that act as a "descriptor". Linux kernel USB Core subsystem gives neat interfaces to talk to different kind of endpoints whether it control, interrupt, bulk or asynchronous endpoint.
Now I have come closer to my very question.
Also the main transfer unit in communication between two USB devices is abstraction called urb - you allocate it, you fill it, you send it to USB Core subsystem, you read it if it was IN type of urb and, finally, you free it. What is confusing for me and tightly related to my question is the next API include/linux/usb.h:
static inline void usb_fill_bulk_urb(struct urb *urb,
struct usb_device *dev,
unsigned int pipe,
void *transfer_buffer,
int buffer_length,
usb_complete_t complete_fn,
void *context)
Assume I have obtained an information from board's datasheet about where to write a program code. Let's say, we have 0x00100 - 0x10000 memory region. I will compile my code, obtain a binary and then using standard Linux tools or writing a simple user-space wrapper application I will use lseek to set file's offset to 0x00100 and write system call provided with a buffer (binary compiled previously) and it's length.
In kernel space, I will have to allocate urb in write system call handler, fill it with a buffer sent from user space and submit this urb to USB Core.
BUT I can not find a way how to specify an OFFSET set earlier by lseek. Do I miss something? Maybe I missed some concepts or, perhaps, I am watching in a wrong way?
When your embedded Linux device acts as a USB mass storage device, the flash as a peripheral on Linux device is unmounted, and the gadget driver is loaded. Linux then loses control to the flash, and now the PC connected to your Linux device fully controls the flash. This is because a flash as a USB device can only has one USb host.
The gadget driver works purely in kernel space. It does not receive or transmit data from/to user space. It calls vfs_read() and vfs_write() to access the files on the flash, with an field offset. The offset is got from the USB commands sent from your host - Windows PC.
There is no way to specify offset using USB subsystem's API. I misunderstood whole conception of USB as communication protocol, unwise me. You must first learn underlying protocol your device uses to communicate with others.
If your device acts as a USB HID device then learning specification of how to exchange data with USB HID device is the way to go. If there is something proprietary then you can do nothing but reverse engineer it (listening USB packets with a sniffer on system where a driver for your device exists).
As for my board it has embedded debugger that serves as a communication module besides being debugger itself. Specifically, my device is equipped with EDBG and here is a link on description of protocol it uses for communication.
I have an ECR(Electronic Cash Register) device,it has a RS-232 com port cable for the connection to PC but I have not been given any drivers for it. I am trying to connect the device to PC but PC is not able to detect the cable. How to detect this device attached on this RS-232? I am working under Linux. Any help on how to find the device is appreciated?
Following is the code snippet I found in C to connect to device based on Baudrate and Com Port number.
int OpenComport(int comport_number, int baudrate)
int SendByte(int comport_number, unsigned char byte)
int SendBuf(int comport_number, unsigned char *buf, int size)
Please see my answer to a related question which shows how to open and configure the serial port.
On Linux, serial ports are almost always /dev/ttyS[0123] (that is /dev/ttyS0, /dev/ttyS1, etc.) for the hardwired ports, and /dev/ttyUSB* for USB ports. The hardwired "devices" may appear only when the hardware is present on some distributions. On others, they always appear whether there is hardware or not. (Try cat /dev/ttyS2 and see if you get the error "no such device".) This is a kernel configuration option which is frequently set to create the device entries whether the hardware is there or not.
The USB ports are present only when there is hardware plugged in, but if there are multiple USB serial ports, it can be difficult identifying which is which.
There is a mechanism within /etc/udev/rules.d/* which can be configured if some aspects of the devices are consistent. See man 7 udev for details.
For applications I have written, I determine which device is which by writing to the device and identifying its response. For devices which don't respond, this is either a worthy programming challenge or a mundane configuration solution.
I think you need to do a little reading about RS-232, and well, C programming also. There are no drivers for RS-232. It is a very "dumb" protocol - you basically just shove data out the port.
The PC cannot detect the cable? That's because it's not USB. Believe it or not, Plug-and-play didn't always exist; you tell the software what port the device is supposedly connected to, and it tries to talk to it.
Furthermore, those aren't "code snippets", those are just function prototypes. There isn't any actual code there.
1>since there's no operating system on your ECR so I guess u don't need any drivers ,instead a firmware will be there in the ECR , which tries to communicate with your Linux UART driver
2> Rs-232 is basically a serial protocol , I mean it has 9 wires , and hence a connecter with 9 pins are used DB-9 connectors ,all the communications inside a processor is in parallel format so a chip called UART is used to convert all the parallel data into serial data , and since yu want to pass the data in Rs-232 format , it needs to be packaged in that format .
3> Linux kernel already has a uart driver , which is implemented for RS-232 . so need to worry about drivers from Linux side.
4> Open a terminal type " dmesg | grep tty " ( connect only the ECR to the PC for rs-232 ports ). it will return something like ttyS or ttyUSB etc , however u just concentrate on ttyS if u have connected only through rs-232 cable .
5> Once u are sure of the ttyS device from the dmesg use minicom (its easy to use ) to communicate with the device.
regards,
Zubraj
I am doing IO programming in C in Ubuntu. And I need the base address of the port to write data.
My laptop dont have a parallel port. So I bought a USB to Parallel port connector. I plugged in the device and its getting detected in /dev/usb/lp0
I ran "lsusb" to see the list of devices and I can see the ID also. But how can I get the base address ? For the usual hardware parallel devices, the base address is 0x0378. this address is not getting detected while using USB to Parallel device.
Please help.
A USB parallel port doesn't have a base address - it's not a meaningful concept for USB. I'm afraid the days of doing I/O on PC hardware via in and out instructions ended a few years ago, though lots of old tutorials still survive on the web.
You can write bytes to the parallel port as a character device, and these will appear on the printer port pins. The USB adapter will expect the other end to handshake data exactly like a printer. If you want to do general I/O prototyping, you're probably better off with a simple USB microcontroller like an Arduino.
Further discussion here.
If you are still interested to use this USB-to-parallel-printer device for your own bit-banging, it's important to know that their built-in firmware always allows controlling of D0..D7, INIT (as outputs), /ERR, ONL, PE (as inputs), but never for /ACK, BUSY (inputs), /STB, /AF, /SEL (outputs) pins.
And you need an 8-bit latch (e.g. 74HCT574) for catching data while strobing.
See here (https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~ygu/bastelecke/PC/USB2LPT/faq#DIY)
especially for possible data rates.
Accessing from software side is a bit complicated but possible, and you may have to re-structure your software and hardware for making such adapters useable. I don't know for Linux case how to access, but IMHO you don't need to write a kernel-mode driver.