Re: Christmas list for the kernel

Gene Heskett
2005-11-23T17:21:48Z

On Wednesday 23 November 2005 09:44, Vojtech Pavlik wrote:
>On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 04:41:02PM -0500, Jon Smirl wrote:
>> On 11/22/05, Kasper Sandberg <lkml@metanurb.dk> wrote:
>> > > Currently you have to compile most of this stuff into the kernel.
>> >
>> > forgive my ignorance, but whats stopping you from doing this now?
>>
>> It would be better if all of the legacy drivers could exist on
>> initramfs and only be loaded if the actual hardware is present. With
>> the current code someone like Redhat has to compile all of the legacy
>> support into their distribution kernel. That code will be present
>> even on new systems that don't have the hardware.
>>
>> An example of this is that the serial driver is hard coded to report
>> four legacy serial ports when my system physically only has two. I
>> have to change a #define and recompile the kernel to change this.
>
>Interesting. Something goes wrong on your system - I have only a single
>serial port on my machine and it's correctly identified by PnP, with no
>other ports showing up.

Now that you mention it:

In my case, I've been getting 6 serial ports reported at boot time
for most of the 2.6.x kernel series. They are just repeats of ttyS0 and
ttyS1, including the ttyS0/1 designation.

>From my last dmesg while booting 2.6.14.2:

serio: i8042 AUX port at 0x60,0x64 irq 12
serio: i8042 KBD port at 0x60,0x64 irq 1
Serial: 8250/16550 driver $Revision: 1.90 $ 2 ports, IRQ sharing enabled
ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A

I had posted about this before, but it was apparently lost in the lists
general noise. I do use both ports here, and they are working, so I
hadn't pursued it further.

--
Cheers, Gene
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