Re: RFC: run-time defining serial ports

[Ralf Baechle <ralf@oss.sgi.com>]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 05:50:33PM -0700, Jun Sun wrote:

> As more and more boards are added to Linux-mips tree, many places are getting
> crowdier and uglier, including serial.h.  The same thing is true for PPC and
> other architectures.
> 
> It turns out an easy solution is to let every board sets the serial port
> definitions at run-time through calling early_serial_setup() routine.
> 
> An easy fix for now is to give a default table size when no serial definition
> is given, which at least reserves some slots in the rs_table array.  See the
> patch below.
> 
> A better solution is probably to provide a config option to define the serial
> table size.

It's needed; I have machines here with upto 11 serial interfaces on a lowly
R4700 box; Origins may have _many_ more.

> A by-product of this arrangement is that you can configure a kernel for
> multiple machines.
> 
> What do you think?

  Ralf