Userpace serial port

[Ricardo Ribalda Delgado]

Hello Greg

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 4:31 PM, Greg KH <greg at kroah.com> wrote:
>
> real-time performance does not mean it has to be in the kernel at all.
>
> And almost no one needs "real" real-time performance, that's a horrible
> check-box that people love to claim is needed and yet, almost no one
> really needs in the end.
>

Agree, I do NOT need real time performace, in fact I can tolerate
msecs of jitter.

This is why I want to have a userland application

>> By looking at our applications, The userspace sollution is more than
>> enough for our requirements.
>>
>> The problem appears when we want to use the serial adapter.  I want to
>> keep using the serial API, but I cannot achieve this from userspace.
>
> I don't understand what type of API you are talking about here.  What
> exactly does ethercat do?  What are you doing that does not work today
> from userspace with the existing serial apis?


Ehtercat is an industrial protocol that runs over ethernet.

In a normal setup, there is one master and multiple slaves. Master is
generally a PC, and the slaves are GPIO boards, serial ports, CAN
bridges....

Ethercat is quite a complex protocol, it has a shared clock, device
discovery.... So before you can read/write a register at a slave you
end up with thousands of lines of code.


What I want to do, is access a ethercat slave serial port like a
"normal" serial port in my computer (/dev/ttyS0, /dev/ttyUSB0,
/dev/ttyUL0....) That way any application can use the serial port with
no modification.

The common approach would be to create a serial port kernel module,
but because it is such a complicated protocol I rather handle it in
userland (same idea as uinput, but for serial ports)


I am now taking a look to Bjørn suggestion about using a pty, and
looks very promising.

Thanks!


-- 
Ricardo Ribalda