UART

When does our assignement have to be handed in?

Deep.

It does not know anything about the connected device. The driver may look at the handshake lines (DTR, RTS, CTS...) but thats not part of the UART.

Regards, Kurt

UART on what?

It doesn't.

A lot of the time those handshaking signals run across the same chip where the UART function is found. But it's true that simple UART need not pay attention to them - they would merely show up in registers the host CPU could access.

With buffered UARTs though, the buffering will not do much good in a handshaked application unless the control circuit for the buffers monitors and drives the handshaking signals. You could of course argue that a buffered UART is simply a dumb UART surrounded by a buffer and it's controller, and argue that the buffer and it's controller are merely part of a driver transformed into hardware.

It depends on the UART. Some don't know anything. Some watch the handshake lines. Some watch for xon/xoff characters.

That depends on the UART. The better UARTs do indeed look at CTS and/or DSR, and some even monitor the receive datastream for xon/xoff characters.

How about reading manuals ?

Think before ask, today: Think, Google, ask ;-)