uart -- driver for Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (UART)
devices
device uart
device puc
device uart
The uart device driver provides support for various classes of UARTs
implementing the EIA RS-232C (CCITT V.24) serial communications interface.
Each such interface is controlled by a seperate and independent
instance of the uart driver. The primary support for devices that contain
multiple serial interfaces or that contain other functionality
besides one or more serial interfaces is provided by the puc(4) device
driver. However, the serial interfaces of those devices that are managed
by the puc(4) driver are controlled by the uart driver. As such, the
puc(4) driver provides umbrella functionality for the uart driver and
hides the complexities that are inherent when elementary components are
packaged together.
The uart driver has a modular design to allow it to be used on differing
hardware and for various purposes. In the following sections the components
are discussed in detail. Options are described in the section that
covers the component to which each option applies.
CORE COMPONENT [Toc] [Back]
At the heart of the uart driver is the core component. It contains the
bus attachments and the low-level interrupt handler.
HARDWARE DRIVERS [Toc] [Back]
The core component and the kernel interfaces talk to the hardware through
the hardware interface. This interface serves as an abstraction of the
hardware and allows varying UARTs to be used for serial communications.
SYSTEM DEVICES [Toc] [Back]
System devices are UARTs that have a special purpose by way of hardware
design or software setup. For example, Sun UltraSparc machines use UARTs
as their keyboard interface. Such an UART cannot be used for general
purpose communications. Likewise, when the kernel is configured for a
serial console, the corresponding UART will in turn be a system device so
that the kernel can output boot messages early on in the boot process.
KERNEL INTERFACES [Toc] [Back]
The last but not least of the components is the kernel interface. This
component ultimately determines how the UART is made visible to the kernel
in particular and to users in general. The default kernel interface
is the TTY interface. This allows the UART to be used for terminals,
modems and serial line IP applications. System devices, with the notable
exception of serial consoles, generally have specialized kernel interfaces.
puc(4)
The uart device driver first appeared in FreeBSD 5.2.
This manual page was written by Marcel Moolenaar <[email protected]>.
FreeBSD 5.2.1 August 25, 2003 FreeBSD 5.2.1 [ Back ] | 