I'm busy writing a driver for a UART. The, struct uart_port has a field uartclk see this link. According to a slide set I found from free-electrons, this is among the most important fields to initialize. Yet, the Xilinx AXI UART Lite, which I'm writing a driver for, doesn't initialize this member see this link to see.
I'm wondering about the importance of this field. What is this in relation to a UART? Why is it important? What role does it play in the serial core?
Thanks
P.S. I know there's a driver existing. However, this driver assumes the UART Lite is to be used in an embedded environment. In the application I'm writing to, this is not the case.
The UART like any other IP in the system has to have functional and interface clocks. In some IPs it might be same clock, in some it might be more interface or functional clocks. The uartclk field reflects the actual frequency on the input to baudrate generator (don't be confused by the frequency of functional clock which most of the time is constant). When user calls termios to set a desired baudrate the UART driver for actual hardware recalculates uartclk, if needed, and bottom layer, if used, configures the registers. That's how 8250 works. In other cases it might be left unused, if, for example, serial hw driver does everything on its own.