[foresto]

My scenario is connecting terminal emulators to getty or u-boot, which I think is a common one. A blip of line noise when plugging in would be barely considered an annoyance, easily cleared by pressing Backspace.

But yes, if someone happens to be using their serial line for some kind of sensitive signaling, then I would agree that choosing a more isolated connector (or just avoiding hotplug) would make sense.

[numpad0]

There's a small risk of CPUs and I/O pins getting fried if GND levels aren't equalized first and instead that equalizing force would go through those pins. One could argue that it's hardware designer's responsibility to save users from such things, but then again, using a better connector than TRS can be one of them.

[eqvinox]

Thing is, for a serial TTL connector to become ubiquitous, it needs to cover at least something like 99% of scenarios. Or maybe 95%. 3.5mm TRS ain't that, and thus just increases general diversity in connectors.

[exmadscientist]

In my experience noise on hot-plugging the serial adapter is a complete nonissue. I'm sure it matters for you, sometimes. But for this kind of embedded work, I'd say it's important far, far less than 1% of the time.

[eqvinox]

In my experience with... it's maybe 20? ... embedded boards, junk during boot breaks the boot flow for about half of them. And attaching quickly after target powerup is very often the crux of the exercise, to get to the bootloader fast enough before it moves on, but also you don't have the shifters (or Vref pin) in place to be able to attach beforehand...

[jaeckel]

Since I once had the case where junk on the line (from a wiggly connection) caused Magic Sysrq requests I'm fully on your side. No junk tolerated for potential hot plug connections.

[foresto]

What byte sequence on a Tx/Rx/Gnd serial line can trigger Sysrq key sequences?

[eqvinox]

It's not a byte sequence, it's a BREAK == pulling the line low for longer than a byte, i.e. invalid serial framing on the stop bit.