docs: driver-api: Add Surface Aggregator subsystem documentation

Add documentation for the Surface Aggregator subsystem and its client
drivers, giving an overview of the subsystem, its use-cases, its
internal structure and internal API, as well as its external API for
writing client drivers.

Signed-off-by: Maximilian Luz <luzmaximilian@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Hans de Goede <hdegoede@redhat.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20201221183959.1186143-8-luzmaximilian@gmail.com
Signed-off-by: Hans de Goede <hdegoede@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 77 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/driver-api/surface_aggregator/overview.rst b/Documentation/driver-api/surface_aggregator/overview.rst
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..1e9d57e50063
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/driver-api/surface_aggregator/overview.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,77 @@
+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+
+
+========
+Overview
+========
+
+The Surface/System Aggregator Module (SAM, SSAM) is an (arguably *the*)
+embedded controller (EC) on Microsoft Surface devices. It has been originally
+introduced on 4th generation devices (Surface Pro 4, Surface Book 1), but
+its responsibilities and feature-set have since been expanded significantly
+with the following generations.
+
+
+Features and Integration
+========================
+
+Not much is currently known about SAM on 4th generation devices (Surface Pro
+4, Surface Book 1), due to the use of a different communication interface
+between host and EC (as detailed below). On 5th (Surface Pro 2017, Surface
+Book 2, Surface Laptop 1) and later generation devices, SAM is responsible
+for providing battery information (both current status and static values,
+such as maximum capacity etc.), as well as an assortment of temperature
+sensors (e.g. skin temperature) and cooling/performance-mode setting to the
+host. On the Surface Book 2, specifically, it additionally provides an
+interface for properly handling clipboard detachment (i.e. separating the
+display part from the keyboard part of the device), on the Surface Laptop 1
+and 2 it is required for keyboard HID input. This HID subsystem has been
+restructured for 7th generation devices and on those, specifically Surface
+Laptop 3 and Surface Book 3, is responsible for all major HID input (i.e.
+keyboard and touchpad).
+
+While features have not changed much on a coarse level since the 5th
+generation, internal interfaces have undergone some rather large changes. On
+5th and 6th generation devices, both battery and temperature information is
+exposed to ACPI via a shim driver (referred to as Surface ACPI Notify, or
+SAN), translating ACPI generic serial bus write-/read-accesses to SAM
+requests. On 7th generation devices, this additional layer is gone and these
+devices require a driver hooking directly into the SAM interface. Equally,
+on newer generations, less devices are declared in ACPI, making them a bit
+harder to discover and requiring us to hard-code a sort of device registry.
+Due to this, a SSAM bus and subsystem with client devices
+(:c:type:`struct ssam_device <ssam_device>`) has been implemented.
+
+
+Communication
+=============
+
+The type of communication interface between host and EC depends on the
+generation of the Surface device. On 4th generation devices, host and EC
+communicate via HID, specifically using a HID-over-I2C device, whereas on
+5th and later generations, communication takes place via a USART serial
+device. In accordance to the drivers found on other operating systems, we
+refer to the serial device and its driver as Surface Serial Hub (SSH). When
+needed, we differentiate between both types of SAM by referring to them as
+SAM-over-SSH and SAM-over-HID.
+
+Currently, this subsystem only supports SAM-over-SSH. The SSH communication
+interface is described in more detail below. The HID interface has not been
+reverse engineered yet and it is, at the moment, unclear how many (and
+which) concepts of the SSH interface detailed below can be transferred to
+it.
+
+Surface Serial Hub
+------------------
+
+As already elaborated above, the Surface Serial Hub (SSH) is the
+communication interface for SAM on 5th- and all later-generation Surface
+devices. On the highest level, communication can be separated into two main
+types: Requests, messages sent from host to EC that may trigger a direct
+response from the EC (explicitly associated with the request), and events
+(sometimes also referred to as notifications), sent from EC to host without
+being a direct response to a previous request. We may also refer to requests
+without response as commands. In general, events need to be enabled via one
+of multiple dedicated requests before they are sent by the EC.
+
+See :doc:`ssh` for a more technical protocol documentation and
+:doc:`internal` for an overview of the internal driver architecture.