Improve HardwareSerial::flush()

The flush() method blocks until all characters in the serial buffer have
been written to the uart _and_ transmitted. This is checked by waiting
until the "TXC" (TX Complete) bit is set by the UART, signalling
completion. This bit is cleared by write() when adding a new byte to the
buffer and set by the hardware after tranmission ends, so it is always
guaranteed to be zero from the moment the first byte in a sequence is
queued until the moment the last byte is transmitted, and it is one from
the moment the last byte in the buffer is transmitted until the first
byte in the next sequence is queued.

However, the TXC bit is also zero from initialization to the moment the
first byte ever is queued (and then continues to be zero until the first
sequence of bytes completes transmission). Unfortunately we cannot
manually set the TXC bit during initialization, we can only clear it. To
make sure that flush() would not (indefinitely) block when it is called
_before_ anything was written to the serial device, the "transmitting"
variable was introduced.

This variable suggests that it is only true when something is
transmitting, which isn't currently the case (it remains true after
transmission is complete until flush() is called, for example).
Furthermore, there is no need to keep the status of transmission, the
only thing needed is to remember if anything has ever been written, so
the corner case described above can be detected.

This commit improves the code by:
 - Renaming the "transmitting" variable to _written (making it more
   clear and following the leading underscore naming convention).
 - Not resetting the value of _written at the end of flush(), there is
   no point to this.
 - Only checking the "_written" value once in flush(), since it can
   never be toggled off anyway.
 - Initializing the value of _written in both versions of _begin (though
   it probably gets initialized to 0 by default anyway, better to be
   explicit).

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions