On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 01:41:53PM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote: > On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 09:16:42AM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > > One option would be to move the 8250-based serial ports, to, say, > > /dev/ttyN* (for National Semiconductors -- the best I could come up > > with) and redefine /dev/ttyS* as a serial port multiplexer which maps in > > all the types, for the ones that really want dynamic mapping. > > > Of course, now you have the potential of aliasing, again, which tends to > > cause all kinds of headaches w.r.t. locking. > > That would break the 99.9% of the the world using Intel-based systems > which only have 8250's, for very little gain. > > Like it or not, /dev/ttySx and 8250 UART's are to serial ports what > the PCI is to system buses....
And the simple answer to this (oh I've been here before) is to leave the existing serial allocations well alone. Then, you allocate a new major number and device name for the dynamically assigned space and arrange for the serial layer to map these new chardevs to the real serial ports. *However* you still run into the issue that you do not know how many serial ports you will need to register a tty driver with the tty layer. Solve that technical problem and the idea of having a single namespace for chosen serial ports and 8250 ports suddenly becomes realistic. Continue ignoring that problem and this thread will just grow with zero real progress. I'm repeating myself though. -- Russell King Linux kernel 2.6 ARM Linux - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/ maintainer of: - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/