Re: Larger dev_t

[Jeff Randall <randall@bif.digi.com>]

Russell King wrote:
> I for one would like to see a major number for all 'serial ports' whether
> they be embedded ARM serial ports _or_ standard 16550 ports, but at the
> moment its not easily acheivable without introducing more mess.
> 
> Ted indicated to me a while ago (just after I wrote serial_core.c for
> yet-another-type-of-ARM-serial-port) his visions of the direction serial
> stuff should take in 2.5; this is obviously one of the things that I'm
> keen to discuss and solve in 2.5.

A change to a 12:20 major:minor dev_t would be a great help for the various
serial drivers that I write and help maintain.  We currently as a company
maintain 4 different serial device drivers for linux and all of them
currently use between 4 and 10 majors in order to have enough raw minors
available to identify the maximum port count supported.  We had to do the
same think on SunOS (which also has 8:8) in order to support reasonable port
counts there.  I'd absoultely love the ability to get back on a single major
per driver.

I'd like to see all of the serial drivers shipped in the kernel tree be
configured by default to use the same major.. but I wouldn't want to have
external drivers forced onto that major as well.

-- 
Jeff Randall - Jeff_Randall@digi.com  "A paranoid person is never alone,
                                       he knows he's always the center
                                       of attention..."