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Alan Cox authored
The API and code have been through various bits of initial review by serial driver people but they definitely need to live somewhere for a while so the unconverted drivers can get knocked into shape, existing drivers that have been updated can be better tuned and bugs whacked out. This replaces the tty flip buffers with kmalloc objects in rings. In the normal situation for an IRQ driven serial port at typical speeds the behaviour is pretty much the same, two buffers end up allocated and the kernel cycles between them as before. When there are delays or at high speed we now behave far better as the buffer pool can grow a bit rather than lose characters. This also means that we can operate at higher speeds reliably. For drivers that receive characters in blocks (DMA based, USB and especially virtualisation) the layer allows a lot of driver specific code that works around the tty layer with private secondary queues to be removed. The IBM folks need this sort of layer, th...
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