[HELP] Serial disable tx-interrupt behaviour (esp32-c3)

[ErikkEnglund]

Description

While looking into extending Espressif esp32-c3 with rs485 rts/de control, i´ve come across a behaviour i cant really get my head around.

I got heads up from Alan to checkout the RS485 implementation in arch/xtensa/src/esp32/esp32_serial.c.
I did a test implementation but didnt manage to get it working as intended.
I dont like the part where it loops over and over again in the interrupt until characters are sent, it looks like a fix for the issue below (i dont have a Xtensa ESP32 board for testing).

The main issue i think is that the Nuttx serialdriver disables tx-interrupts after putting the characters into the txfifo, making it impossible to catch the BRK_DONE/BRK_IDLE interrupt correctly.

The following is observed if we put some debug characters to the console when enabling/disabling interrupts for UART1.
(in arch/risc-v/src/common/espressif/esp_serial.c - esp_txint).

Where ^ marks Enabling interrupts and _ marks disabling.
nsh> serialblaster /dev/ttyS1 100
Sending 100 bytes of data to /dev/ttyS1 (fd=3)
_^^^__^_nsh>

DIS_TX_IRQ
ENA_TX_IRQ
DIS_TX_IRQ
DIS_TX_IRQ
ENA_TX_IRQ
DIS_TX_IRQ
DIS_TX_IRQ
ENA_TX_IRQ
DIS_TX_IRQ
DIS_TX_IRQ
ENA_TX_IRQ
DIS_TX_IRQ

It looks quite correct from the console but when checking the logic analyzer we can see that the tx-interrupt disable happends immediately after putting the data into the txfifo and leaving with tx interrupts disabled.
The result is that we cant reset the RTS/DE, until we send another character on the bus, which enables tx interrupts - which in turns imediately fires the interrupt and we can reset our pin.
Is this the intended behaviour? I have´nt dug deeper into the Nuttx serial driver part, as i guess this should work as intended on other chips and wouldnt require any modifications.

Guarding the uart_hal_disable_intr_mask() for UART1 with a uart_hal_is_tx_idle(), keeps interrupts active and the system works correctly.
But as it cant disable the interrupts, the serial drivers keeps calling for disabling tx interrupts, wasting cpu cycles.

nsh> serialblaster /dev/ttyS1 100
Sending 100 bytes of data to /dev/ttyS1 (fd=3)
_^^^_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________^_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________nsh>

I would like to be pointed in the right direction going forward and im sorry if this is a question that should be self explanatory, as im not very familiar with Nuttx.

Im building in WSL2 Ubuntu 22.04 and gcc version 10.2.0 (SiFive GCC-Metal 10.2.0-2020.12.8)

Verification

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[acassis]

@ErikkEnglund thanks for opening this issue to include all the details. Did you get some progress testing on STM32 too?