Device information for PDAs

[Andrei Yurkevich]

On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 17:05 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:

> > The issue with two ports only makes sense on PalmOS PDAs. IIRC, one of
> > them is for HotSync while the other can be used for PPP communication
> > between the PDA and the PC. Moreover, the Serial Port 0 is used as
> > HotSync on certain models (some Sony Clies), while the Port 1 is used on
> > all the others. 
> OK, so for the 'visor' driver we assume port 1 (like the device
> information file I mentioned does) and have a whitelist for devices to
> use port 0?

Right.

> > One more issue are the weird Microsoft Magneto aka
> > Pocket PC 2005 devices that will appear later this year. Those beasts
> > are going to have a serial device accompanied by a mass-storage
> > interface. All the PDA-specific communication will go via the serial
> > device while the mass-storage interface will be used to mount their
> > filesystem as a storage card or whatever.
> > Taking this into account, I suppose that we'd better stick with USB
> > interface or even the usb device as the device that represents the PDA
> > and making "pda.serial_device" a strlist, storing both ports in case of
> > Palm device, 
> There's a problem with doing this since it will be difficult to maintain
> as the serial port object is created much later than the USB interface
> object. There's also the problem on what to do when the serial port
> driver (visor, pl2303 etc.) unbinds from the USB interface.

Remove any pda.* properties and capabilities. But yes, you're right,
it's not that siple.

> Also, with the approach of storing things on the actual serial port
> object it will be much easier to support e.g. Bluetooth, IRDA and legacy
> serial devices once HAL gains support for these [1].
> So, I'd really like to keep it simple and just put the 'pda' capability
> and properties on the serial port device instead - that's really where
> they belong IMHO. Can we do this?

Well, in this case serial device is of course the thing we need. Ok, I
now agree, let it be the serial device.

> > however adding some "pda.palm.hotsync_port" and
> > "pda.palm.raw_port" to distinguish between the two. Or, we can even
> > treat the port as a platform-specific thing making it
> > "pda.palm.hotsync_device" and "pda.palm.raw_device" for PalmOS PDAs and
> > "pda.pocketpc.serial_device" for Windows CE PDAs.
> I'd rather just assign another capability and set of properties to the
> other serial port if we really want to expose this. Is this really
> important to support initially?

I don't know for sure - I'm not an expert in how Palm devices work. Let
us not touch the 2nd port for now then. However, for Palm devices, a
reference to it could be stored in some property of the pda/serial1
device entry, something like "pda.palm.raw_serial_device"?

Just to sum up then:

 1) serial ports are marked as PDA devices. A 'pda' capability is set
and a 'pda.platform' property, the latter is figured out depending on
what driver runs the parent USB interface.
 2) all other information is stored as "pda.palm.*", "pda.pocketpc.*"
and "pda.whateverelse.*".

> > > So, Andrei, does this approach work for you? Would it work for the iPaq
> > > and Pocket PC's too? If so, would you be interested in extending the
> > > 10-usb-pda.fdi file? 
> > Sure, I would gladly take care of the fdi file for PDAs.
> That sounds excellent!

I'll now modify my fdi for Pocket PCs I know of and email it to you. Or
dare I ask about CVS access?

cheers,
Andrei


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