Re: [RFC 0/2] x86: Add support for Atheros AR1520 GPS devices

[Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>]

On Fri, May 06, 2011 at 03:09:38PM -0700, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
> These two patches adds support for the Atheros AR1520 GPS device,
> currently only pegged onto an mrst platform. This creates a character
> device called ar1520 and lets userspace talk to it through it. My only
> concern against this approach is that it this requires a custom userspace
> application for reseting the device, waking it up and for blocking reads
> through ioctl. The character device can be used to read/write data to it
> as well.

I really don't like using a character device for this, what's wrong with
a tty device instead like other GPS devices are using today (i.e. a
number of USB GPS devices)?

I don't understand what these ioctls are supposed to be doing, can't
they map to standard tty ioctls that we already have for flow control so
that userspace doesn't have to write a whole new application just to
talk to yet-another-gps-device?

thanks,

greg k-h