[lldb-dev] Serial port support in LLDB

[Michał Górny via lldb-dev]

Hi, everyone.

I'm working on improving LLDB's feature parity with GDB.  As part of
this, I'm working on bettering LLDB's serial port support.  Since serial
ports are not that common these days, I've been asked to explain a bit
what I'd like to do.


At this point, LLDB (client) has minimal support for serial port
debugging.  You can use a command like:

    process connect file:///dev/ttyS0

to connect via the GDB Remote Protocol over a serial port.  However,
the client hardcodes serial transmission parameters (I'll explain
below).  I haven't been able to find an option to bind lldb-server to a
serial port.

I'd like to fix the both limitations, i.e. make it possible to configure
serial port parameters and add support for serial port in lldb-server.


The RS-232 standard is quite open ended, so I'm going to focus on 8250-
compatible serial port with DB-9 connector below (i.e. the kind found
in home PCs).  However, I'm going to skip the gory details and just
focus on the high-level problem.

The exact protocol used to transmit data over the serial port is
configurable to some degree.  However, there is no support for
autoconfiguration, so both ends have to be configured the same.
The synchronization support is also minimal.

The important hardware parameters that can be configured are:

- baud rate, i.e. data transmission speed that implies the sampling
  rate.  The higher the baud rate, the shorter individual bits are
  in the transmitted signal.  If baud rate is missynced, then
  the receiver will get wrong bit sequences.

- number of data bits (5-8) in the frame, lower values meaning that
  the characters sent are being truncated.  For binary data transfers,
  8 data bits must be used.

- parity used to verify frame correctness.  The parity bit is optional, 
  and can be configured to use odd or even parity.  Additionally, Linux 
  supports sending constant 0 or 1 as parity bit.

- number of stop bits (1 or 1.5/2) in the frame.  The use of more than 
  one stop bit is apparently a relict that was supposed to give
  the receiver more time for processing.  I think this one isn't 
  strictly necessary nowadays.

- flow control (none, software, hardware).  This is basically used by 
  the receiver to inform the sender that it's got its buffer full
  and the sender must stop transmitting.  Software flow control used
  in-band signaling, so it's not suitable for binary protocols.
  Hardware flow control uses control lines.

Of course, there is more to serial ports than just that but for LLDB's
purposes, this should be sufficient.


The POSIX and win32 API for serial ports are quite similar in design. 
In the POSIX API, you have to open a character device corresponding to
the serial port, while in win32 API a special path \\.\COMn.  In both
cases, reads and writes effect the transmission.  Both systems also have
a dedicated API to configure the serial transmission parameters
(ioctl/termios on POSIX [1], DCB on win32 [2]).  Note that I haven't
tried the win32 API, just looked it up.

The POSIX serial ports are a teletype (tty) devices just like virtual
consoles used by terminal emulators.  This makes it easy to use a serial
port as a remote terminal for other system.  This also adds a bunch of
configuration options related to input/output processing and special
behavior.  When a serial port is going to be used for non-console
purposes, these flags have to be disabled (i.e. the tty is set to 'raw'
mode).


The rough idea is that after opening the serial port, we need to set its
parameters to match the other end.  For this to work, I need to replace
LLDB's hardwired parameters with some way of specifying this.  I think
the cleanest way of doing this (and following GDB's example) would be to
add a new set of configuration variables to specify:

a. the baud rate used

b. the parity kind used

c. the number of stop bits

d. whether to use hardware flow control

I'm thinking of creating a new setting group for this, maybe
'host.serial'.  When connecting to a serial port, LLDB would set its
parameters based on the settings from this group.

That said, I can't think of a really clean way of making this
configurable on lldb-server's end but I guess adding more command-line
parameters should suffice.

WDYT?


[1] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man0/termios.h.0p.html
[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winbase/ns-winbase-dcb

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny