Re: [PATCH] serial/8250: Increase number of serial ports to 32

[Matt Schulte <matts@commtech-fastcom.com>]

On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 10:08 AM, Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 02:54:39PM +0100, Yegor Yefremov wrote:
>> This will make sure that multiple serial port cards can be
>> used out of the box. Otherwise the user must pass
>> nr_uarts parameter, that will be often forgotten and increases
>> support requests for serial card vendors.
>
> Has this really happened in the past?  What is the downside of changing
> this option that has been around for many years now?  Also note that
> multi-port serial cards are more rare these days than they used to be so
> changing this seems a bit pointless now.
>

Multiport serial cards are not dead, we still sell bunches.  This is
one of those problems that really frustrates our customers.  They want
their ports to show up by default and the only way to do it is to
recompile the kernel or modify the boot line.  A lot of my customers
don't like the 82510.nr_uarts work around in grub and so we have to
hold their hands while they figure out how to recompile the kernel
with support for more ports.  I think the default number of ports
should definitely be changed from 4 to at least 8, maybe even 16 or
32.

Matt Schulte
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