Re: MacSerial and Serial driver cohabitation

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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