Re: Out of tree GPL serial tty driver help?

[Mark Hounschell <markh@compro.net>]

On 04/26/2013 10:35 AM, Greg KH wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 10:28:01AM -0400, Mark Hounschell wrote:
>> This particular driver and one other are normal PCI based cards. I
>> also have one other that is PCI-e. This particular one is the only
>> one that creates all these weird device entries. The other 2 are
>> pretty straight forward. One entry per port. I figured I'd tackle
>> this one first.
>
> I would remove those other "weird" device entries from the driver, we
> removed those types of device nodes from the kernel tree many many years
> ago.  Just stick to one device node per port, and all should be fine.
>

Ya, you are certainly right there. First things first though.

> Also, any reason why these drivers aren't in the main kernel tree?  If
> they were, all of this work would have been done for you :)
>

Yes, I wish they were in the kernel. I've had to maintain them since the 
2.6 days because Digi just won't do it and their cards do what we need 
quite well and are still current products. Ya, you can buy a brand new 
one but the latest kernel supported is 2.6. I think Digi at one point 
long ago may have tried the "in kernel" route but you probably know more 
about that than I do.

Since 2.6, the maintenance on these hasn't been to bad, until udev came 
along. But I guess after 3.4 the tty layer is going through quite some 
changes that I have yet to understand.

Actually, we also have 3-4 of our own "out of kernel" GPL drivers that I 
would love to see in the kernel. They are mature and only require 
changes when something in the kernel changes. That's another story though.

Regards
Mark