diff doc/DUART28-boot-control @ 764:26daa2720bda

doc/DUART28-boot-control: update on the Linux driver patch status
author Mychaela Falconia <falcon@freecalypso.org>
date Sun, 06 Dec 2020 04:07:48 +0000
parents 6d97866bad79
children 78101799417c
line wrap: on
line diff
--- a/doc/DUART28-boot-control	Wed Dec 02 20:32:02 2020 +0000
+++ b/doc/DUART28-boot-control	Sun Dec 06 04:07:48 2020 +0000
@@ -60,19 +60,26 @@
 open, thereby giving userspace applications full control of these UART outputs
 via TIOCMBIS and TIOCMBIC ioctls.
 
-The patch has been submitted to the ftdi_sio maintainer for inclusion in
-mainline Linux, but we should not set our hopes too high: while the patch should
-be non-controversial given that it adds support for an entirely new USB ID (one
-that was officially allocated to Falconia Partners LLC by FTDI, mind you) and
-does not disrupt anything pre-existing in any way whatsoever, getting ANY kind
-of patch accepted into mainline is generally tantamount to the Seven Circles of
-Hell.  And even if we do get our patch accepted into bleeding-edge mainline
-Linux, it does not help Slackware users running older kernels without updates -
-thus serious FreeCalypso users should be prepared to apply our ftdi_sio driver
-patch locally on their own systems.
+The first version of our DUART28C support patch was submitted to ftdi_sio
+maintainer Johan Hovold in 2020-09.  Minor refinements were made in late 2020-09
+into early 2020-10, then nothing happened until the end of 2020-11.  As our
+fc-host-tools-r14 release is being prepared in early 2020-12, the latest from
+Johan is that he is not interested in merging our DUART28C support patch by
+itself, but he does have a generalized solution which would be equally
+acceptable to FreeCalypso because it still does what we need.  The latest status
+from Johan as of fc-host-tools-r14 release time is this proposed patch series:
 
-The official Slackware-applicable version of the needed ftdi_sio driver patch
-can be found in our freecalypso-hwlab Hg repository.
+https://lore.kernel.org/linux-serial/X8iuCXYhOBVMGvXv@localhost/T/
+
+However, the comments in that thread indicate that the maintainers seem intent
+on delaying this integration until 5.12 merge window if not even later, thus we
+are still months away from any hope of resolution.
+
+For those FreeCalypso DUART28 users who are like the Mother, desiring to use
+the boot control feature now without waiting indefinitely for Linux kernel
+maintainers to get their act together, the linux-patch directory in our
+freecalypso-hwlab Hg repository contains several versions of our DUART28C
+support patch that are meant to be applied locally by end users.
 
 EEPROM configuration
 ====================