On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 6:00 PM, Iain Hibbert <plu...@rya-online.net> wrote: > On Fri, 12 Mar 2010, David Holland wrote: >> Line disciplines are a bad example, because they're a prehistoric kind >> of hacked-up bus attachment and as such ought to be rototilled out of >> existence. > > Well, line discipline is a solution to a problem, which is that we want a > 'device' in the kernel but the device is not directly accessible and > communicates to us through a serial protocol. > > You can say its a bad idea all you like, but unless you suggest an > alternative solution that doesn't help to remove it. > > One alternative is to move the translator out of the kernel, eg instead of > using the pppd(8) which needs complicated hooks, import userland ppp(8) as > per FreeBSD which IIRC provides a tap(4) interface. The argument against > that is probably not as strong as it once was as even embedded devices > these days can be several orders of magnitude faster than the computers > that were prevalent when pppd(8) was written. But then, data rates have > improved also - pppd(8) runs on my uhso(4) dongle at up to 180KiB/s and I > expect there would still be objections to removing it. > > Any other solutions you would like to propose?
Although I have 0 knowledge & have no time to learn tty/line disc at the moment, I fully support to fix those *now*. You need struct device. You understand how data/control flow. I think it's perfectly reasonable to make it a device as a "function". Masao
