Question

I have a system where I am seeing strange behavior with the serial ports that I don’t expect. I’ve previously seen this on occasion with usb-to-serial adapters, but now I’m seeing it on native serial ports as well, with much greater frequency.

The system is set up to run automated tests and will first perform some tasks that cause a large amount of data to be outputted from the serial device while I do not have the ports open. The device will also reset itself. Only the tx/rx lines are connected. There is no flow control.

After these tasks complete, the testware opens the serial ports and immediately fails because it gets unexpected responses. When I reproduce this, I found that if I open the serial port in a terminal program, I see several kilobytes of old data (that appears to have been sent when the port was closed) immediately flushed out. Once I close this program, I can then run the tests as expected.

What could cause this to happen? How does Linux handle buffering the serial port when the device is closed? If I opened a device, made it send output, and then closed it without reading from it, would this cause the same problem?

Answer 1

The Linux terminal driver buffers input even if it is not opened. This can be a useful feature, especially if the speed/parity/etc. are set appropriately.

To replicate the behavior of lesser operating systems, read all pending input from the port as soon as it is open:

...
int fd = open ("/dev/ttyS0", O_RDWR | O_NOCTTY | O_SYNC);
if (fd < 0)
        exit (1);

set_blocking (fd, 0);   // disable reads blocked when no input ready

char buf [10000];
int n;
do {
        n = read (fd, buf, sizeof buf);
} while (n > 0);

set_blocking (fd, 1);  // enable read blocking (if desired)

...  // now there is no pending input



void set_blocking (int fd, int should_block)
{
        struct termios tty;
        memset (&tty, 0, sizeof tty);
        if (tcgetattr (fd, &tty) != 0)
        {
                error ("error %d getting term settings set_blocking", errno);
                return;
        }

        tty.c_cc[VMIN]  = should_block ? 1 : 0;
        tty.c_cc[VTIME] = should_block ? 5 : 0; // 0.5 seconds read timeout

        if (tcsetattr (fd, TCSANOW, &tty) != 0)
                error ("error setting term %sblocking", should_block ? "" : "no");
}