serial: skip a dead COM1 via a loopback probe (fixes ~57s real-HW boot)

On a legacy-free board COM1 is decoded but has no live UART: its LSR reads 0x00, so the transmit-holding-empty bit never sets and writeByte spun its full 100k-iteration guard on every logged byte (~15ms/byte x ~3.7k bytes to 'initialised' ~= 57s). QEMU always has a working UART, so this only bit real hardware; the boot log survived via log.ramSink.

- probe() loopback-tests the UART in init(); write() is a no-op when absent, so a dead port costs nothing per byte
- guard cut 100k -> 5k (backstop for a live-but-stalled UART only)
- serialPresent() + a boot line making the absent-UART case visible
This commit is contained in:
Daniel Samson
2026-07-13 21:15:56 +01:00
parent 67702fa250
commit 4cb4f2a80f
3 changed files with 52 additions and 4 deletions
@@ -106,6 +106,12 @@ pub fn serialWrite(bytes: []const u8) void {
serial.write(bytes);
}
/// Whether a working UART was detected (loopback probe). When false the serial
/// sink is silently inert — a dead legacy COM1 costs nothing per byte.
pub fn serialPresent() bool {
return serial.present();
}
/// Emit a one-byte progress checkpoint to whatever hardware debug sink the
/// platform has — here the POST diagnostic port (0x80), which a POST card or BMC
/// displays. The last-resort progress signal when there's no text output at all.