Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: [PATCH] Stop pmac_zilog from abusing 8250's device numbers. | From | David Woodhouse <> | Date | Tue, 03 Apr 2007 20:54:10 -0400 |
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On Tue, 2007-04-03 at 15:10 -0700, Brad Boyer wrote: > I suppose my opinion on this shows that I didn't come from the x86 > side of Linux.
Perhaps, yes -- if you were just an x86 user you'd be unlikely to care about the issue at all -- mostly because it's never been a problem there. Not for the reason you imply, but just because the additional types of serial port you encounter on an x86 machine have always got it _right_, and had separate names and device numbers rather than abusing major 64 and 'ttyS%d'.
> The breakdown on this argument seems to have always > been that the x86 people wanted 8250 to own ttyS* and most others > wanted it shared.
But why? There's nothing special and magical about the number 64 and the letters 't' 't' 'y' and 'S'. And if you have broken software which only works with ttyS[0123] then you can still create device nodes or symlinks to work around that.
If you're on a platform where 8250 serial ports _cannot_ exist, then abusing the 8250 driver's numbers would perhaps be workable, if a little strange -- but 8250 ports are ubiquitous. You can attach them to just about anything, of any architecture, that Linux runs on. Except perhaps S390.
Yes, it would be theoretically possible to come up with a way to share minor numbers so we can use 'ttyS0' for the first serial port regardless of what type of port it is. We could take the arch-specific hack that SPARC has and try to move it to generic code. But what's the point?
-- dwmw2
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