Re: [PATCH] PCI serial card support

["Vesa Jääskeläinen" <chaac@nic.fi>]

Robert Millan wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 06:52:21PM +0200, Vesa Jääskeläinen wrote:
>> n0ano@n0ano.com wrote:
>>> Bad news, I heard back from the two people who wrote the PCI serial
>>> code for Linux (Russell King & Ted Tso) and they both agree that,
>>> no matter how the ambiguity got into the Linux source files, their
>>> intent was that the code was GPL v2 only.
>>>
>>> That being the case, we can't use the code and I don't want to try
>>> and re-write it from scratch so we're back to having the user manually
>>> specify the I/O port address but at least I can create a PCI ID table
>>> to map the base baud.
>> Ok. Then I would suggest that only simple change is made at this time to
>> support it. So we start from scratch on that implementation. Anyway...
>> it can be improved later on.
> 
> Why not use PCI ID to support this particular card?  This way Donald doesn't
> have to support all cards, but the base is laid out so more cards can be added
> in the future.

I have nothing against that. But in any case I think there has to be
this override functionality support. Just make it a bit harder for user
to type so they know it is advanced feature :). Making these transparent
for user is always a plus.

I just feel that it might be a bit overkill to chain this module to pci
module. Of course you can dynamically check if PCI module is there and
then ask identification information from there. If you make it other way
around so that some other module references to serial module and then
just registers new serial device there then that is better of course.

isnmod pciserial [device location in system, or if omitted, autodetect]?