This allows to efficiently send to an I2C slave data that is made up of
more than one buffer. Instead of needing to allocate temporary memory to
combine buffers together this new method allows to pass in a tuple or list
of buffers. The name is based on the POSIX function writev() which has
similar intentions and signature.
The reasons for taking this approach (compared to having an interface with
separate start/write/stop methods) are:
- It's a backwards compatible extension.
- It's convenient for the user.
- It's efficient because there is only one Python call, then the C code can
do everything in one go.
- It's efficient on the I2C bus because the implementation can do
everything in one go without pauses between blocks of bytes.
- It should be possible to implement this extension in all ports, for
hardware and software I2C.
Further discussion is found in issue #3482, PR #4020 and PR #4763.
Recent gcc versions (at least 9.1) give a warning about using "sp" in the
clobber list. Such code is removed by this patch. A dedicated function is
instead used to set SP and branch to the bootloader so the code has full
control over what happens.
Fixes issue #4785.
This also fixes deleting the PPP task, since eTaskGetState() never returns
eDeleted.
A limitation with this patch: once the PPP is deactivated (ppp.active(0))
it cannot be used again. A new PPP instance must be created instead.
The user can now select their own package index by either passing the "-i"
command line option, or setting the upip.index_urls variable (before doing
an install).
The https://micropython.org/pi package index hosts packages from
micropython-lib and will be searched first when installing a package. If a
package is not found here then it will fallback to PyPI.
This allows figuring out the number of bytes in the memoryview object as
len(memview) * memview.itemsize.
The feature is enabled via MICROPY_PY_BUILTINS_MEMORYVIEW_ITEMSIZE and is
disabled by default.