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authorJulius Werner <jwerner@chromium.org>2014-04-17 20:00:20 -0700
committerMarc Jones <marc.jones@se-eng.com>2014-12-22 21:44:37 +0100
commit2fe505bd9a4ff4e3e8bf081f254e0b71e41997be (patch)
treedfbcbb7f7878c466d724132ab3ae212b4ac7b475 /documentation/beginverbatim.tex
parent6d5657d620e941f419d252e53ad79f2c1b41ea08 (diff)
libpayload: console: Allow output drivers to print whole strings at once
The console output driver framework in libpayload is currently built on the putchar primitive, meaning that every driver's function gets called one character at a time. This becomes an issue when we add drivers that could output multiple characters at a time, but have a high constant overhead per invocation (such as the planned GDB stub, which needs to wrap a special frame around output strings and wait for an acknowledgement from the server). This patch adds a new 'write' function pointer to the console_output_driver structure as an alternative to 'putchar'. Output drivers need to provide at least one of the two ('write' is preferred if available). The CBMEM console driver is ported as a proof of concept (since it's our most performace-critical driver and should in theory benefit the most from less function pointer invocations, although it's probably still negligible compared to the big sprawling mess that is printf()). Even with this fix, the problem remains that printf() was written with the putchar primitive in mind. Even though normal text already contains an optimization to allow multiple characters at a time, almost all formatting directives cause their output (including things like padding whitespace) to be putchar()ed one character at a time. Therefore, this patch reworks parts of the output code (especially number printing) to all but remove that inefficiency (directives still invoke an extra write() call, but at least not one per character). Since I'm touching printf() core code anyway, I also tried to salvage what I could from that weird, broken "return negative on error" code path (not that any of our current output drivers can trigger it anyway). A final consequence of this patch is that the responsibility to prepend line feeds with carriage returns is moved into the output driver implementations. Doing this only makes sense for drivers with explicit cursor position control (i.e. serial or video), and things like the CBMEM console that appears like a normal file to the system really have no business containing carriage returns (we don't want people to accidentally associate us with Windows, now, do we?). BUG=chrome-os-partner:18390 TEST=Made sure video and CBMEM console still look good, tried printf() with as many weird edge-case strings as I could find and compared serial output as well as sprintf() return value. Original-Change-Id: Ie05ae489332a0103461620f5348774b6d4afd91a Original-Signed-off-by: Julius Werner <jwerner@chromium.org> Original-Reviewed-on: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/196384 Original-Reviewed-by: Hung-Te Lin <hungte@chromium.org> Original-Reviewed-by: David Hendricks <dhendrix@chromium.org> (cherry picked from commit ab1ef0c07736fe1aa3e0baaf02d258731e6856c0) Signed-off-by: Marc Jones <marc.jones@se-eng.com> Change-Id: I78f5aedf6d0c3665924995cdab691ee0162de404 Reviewed-on: http://review.coreboot.org/7880 Tested-by: build bot (Jenkins) Reviewed-by: Patrick Georgi <pgeorgi@google.com>
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