Re: serial drivers

Theodore Y. Ts'o (tytso@MIT.EDU)
Fri, 1 Aug 1997 22:22:31 -0400


Date: Fri, 1 Aug 1997 10:37:45 +0200
From: Jes Sorensen <Jes.Sorensen@cern.ch>

What would you say to that we created a drivers/serial directory and
moved all the serial drivers in there?

No objections here.

I've actually have wanted for a while to try to slim down the various
serial drivers. For example, at some point get rid of /dev/cuaXXX
support once and for all, from *all* of the drivers.

Also, while I'm against trying to fold more low-level support for very
dissimilar devices into serial.c (which people from the m68k port have
suggested a long time ago and which I resisted strenuously, because I
didn't want serial.c getting any bigger), I do recognize that that
there's a lot of duplicated code in the existing tty drivers.

What I want to do is similar to what the SCSI device drivers do ---
provide common routines which drivers *may* call to accomplish certain
very common tasks. Other tasks, such as the baud rate decoding, should
be done at the tty layer, and provided in the tty_struct as tty->baud.
(Speaking of which, it's also time to get rid of the ugly SPD_VHI hack;
all of the new libc's should support the higher baud rates directly).

Any objections? Speak now.....

- Ted