Re: MacSerial and Serial driver cohabitation

[Michael Schmitz <schmitz@opal.biophys.uni-duesseldorf.de>]

Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> And CHRP boxes, which may have both 16550 and 8530 serial ports on the
> motherboard. Never tried my 8530 ports, though.
>
> To me it would sound logical to start counting serial ports from ttyS0 in one
> driver, and continue counting in a second driver, and so on. We had that on
> m68k, but the PC guys didn't like it and want to keep the current scheme (one
> major device for 16550 serial, and one for each type of multiserial board on
> the market).

I think the fight was rather about other design decisions in the m68k
driver, not as much about the device numbering. As far as I recall, the
proposed solution was to have the 'builtin' serials at least on m68k use
the default (16550) major but cut out the midlevel abstraction. I never
understood what was supposed to perform hardware abstraction though.

I'd say agree on a fixed order of probing, allocate minors in that order
(with the possible exception of allowing a driver to allocate specific
minors out of order if someone wants to make sure their driver always
gets the same minors).

	Michael

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