This can be very useful for some purposes:
* It makes it possible to disable the UART in cases where it is not
needed or needs to be disabled to conserve power.
* It makes it possible to disable the serial output to reduce code
size, which may be important for some chips. Sometimes, a few kB can
be saved this way.
* It makes it possible to override the default, for example you might
want to use an actual UART to debug the USB-CDC implementation.
It also lowers the dependency on having machine.Serial defined, which is
often not defined when targeting a chip. Eventually, we might want to
make it possible to write `-target=nrf52` or `-target=atmega328p` for
example to target the chip itself with no board specific assumptions.
The defaults don't change. I checked this by running `make smoketest`
before and after and comparing the results.
Previously, the machine.UART0 object had two meanings:
- it was the first UART on the chip
- it was the default output for println
These two meanings conflict, and resulted in workarounds like:
- Defining UART0 to refer to the USB-CDC interface (atsamd21,
atsamd51, nrf52840), even though that clearly isn't an UART.
- Defining NRF_UART0 to avoid a conflict with UART0 (which was
redefined as a USB-CDC interface).
- Defining aliases like UART0 = UART1, which refer to the same
hardware peripheral (stm32).
This commit changes this to use a new machine.Serial object for the
default serial port. It might refer to the first or second UART
depending on the board, or even to the USB-CDC interface. Also, UART0
now really refers to the first UART on the chip, no longer to a USB-CDC
interface.
The changes in the runtime package are all just search+replace. The
changes in the machine package are a mixture of search+replace and
manual modifications.
This commit does not affect binary size, in fact it doesn't affect the
resulting binary at all.
This means that machine.UART0, machine.UART1, etc are of type
*machine.UART, not machine.UART. This makes them easier to pass around
and avoids surprises when they are passed around by value while they
should be passed around by reference.
There is a small code size impact in some cases, but it is relatively
minor.
