Re: Black box flight recorder for Linux

[Krzysztof Halasa <khc@pm.waw.pl>]

Hi,

Andy Green <andy@warmcat.com> writes:

> A whole other way forward is to consider to replace the EEPROM from
> the original proposal (which does provide its own advantages such as
> simplicity, I accept) with something else that ends up on another
> PC. In this concept some logic presents a fake I2C peripheral to the
> DDC interface at an I2C address of our choosing.  This logic acts as a
> bidirectional "UART" type of thing, allowing transfer of data in both
> directions between the Linux box being debugged and another PC.

Right. I think one could use something like ATMEL 89F2051 (20-pin 8051
non-SMD clones with flash and hardware UART) or something similar.

Client I2C is difficult in Linux (using general purpose I/O port) but
with a dedicated CPU it's not a problem (not sure about 400 kHz access).

> http://warmcat.com/milksop/filtror.html

Well, that's a bit more complicated. I'm not going to try that on
an experimental PCB :-)

> However this would be much simpler, not even needing RAM.  It can hook
> to the second PC by the same I2C method, parallel printer port, RS232
> or USB depending on the level of complexity of the design.
>
> I guess the link will feel quite like a 9600 or 19200 baud serial port
> in terms of throughput.

Depends on I2C. With something like 400 kHz it should be faster,
probably like 115200.

> Maybe this effort is considered too esoteric, but it seems to me to be
> a reason to keep the DDC access drivers standalone, the
> hardware-specific framebuffer drivers can call through to them and we
> can use them in a clean way.  I realize this is a bit of a late
> objection and that there was not previously much point to keeping them
> as separate things in the world.

Actually we have:
- the Xserver "hardware access" issue
- DRI/DRM
- now the I2C bus driver
- frame buffer

To avoid conflicts we really need them managed by a single driver.
Probably the GGI (KGI?) should be revisited?

Long-term project, unfortunatelly, but I think we'll have to do that
eventually.

The I2C, graphics subsystem and DRI/DRM could be sub-modules, with
the master module only keeping track of hardware access, mode
settings etc.
-- 
Krzysztof Halasa
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