On Thu, Jan 2, 2014 at 2:29 PM, Linus Torvalds
[off-list ref] wrote:

So I do have two dongles, because I was afraid of that. Can you tell
me how to debug *those* just connected to each other? Preferably on
the same machine, because I'll be traveling soon..

Side note: is there any *reason* why two pty's connected to each other
can't work? They should look very much like a dongle that just doesn't
do any encapsulation of the data, and it really *almost* works. I can
actually get the simulator that uses the irda sockets to run over
them, except it will hang eventually in some timing-dependent manner.

It works well enough that I'd be inclined to blame some kernel bug.
Especially considering that I found what looked like obvious kernel
bugs already (neither of which fixes the hang, though).

             Linus