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Date:      Fri, 1 Sep 1995 11:53:18 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
To:        peter@nmti.com (Peter da Silva)
Cc:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Gritching about serial port naming, plus Digiboard driver Q...
Message-ID:  <199509011653.LAA09161@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
In-Reply-To: <9508312004.AA20121@sonic.nmti.com.nmti.com> from "Peter da Silva" at Aug 31, 95 03:04:01 pm

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> > As it is I find it rather disconcerting that if I have a BB2016 in addition
> > to the 4 internal serial ports, the BB ports are "sio4-19" and the tty names
> > are correspondingly screwed.
> 
> You could do what DEC does and have device names that have no relation to
> the minor numbers. That would waste fewer minors, too.

Yes, this is entirely true.  I am thinking about this more from an
administrative point of view, I suppose....  but then again, how do you deal
with the case where somebody has installed

com1/com2 as tty00-01 minor #s 0,1
BB2016 as tty10-1f minor #s 2-17

and then decides to install com3/4 as tty02-03?

With the recent minor number range expansion, maybe it would make sense to
assign something like 64 or 256 ports per letter, and just be done with it
all...?

tty00-01 minor #s 0,1
tty10-13 minor #s 256-259
tty20-23 minor #s 512-515
etc

That way when somebody replaces a 4 port card with a 16 port card, there are
no device names and minors to be shuffled.

I don't really know from a kernel point of view how "wasteful" this is, but
it would be really nice to see an easily manageable setup for serial ports.

> I like the upper-lower distinction for dialin/dialout ports, myself, and it
> makes things nice for PS and friends. It's not like anyone's going to run
> on an ASR-33 or adm-3a without a lowercase ROM and get \ in the output...

I don't like it, but that's opinion.

> > Any luck?  :-)
> 
> Waiting for an Adaptec 1542 (it's an old ISA machine I'm rehabbing) so I can
> start the install. I have three Digiboard PC/8e cards I want to use. Do I need
> to install 2.1-STABLE to track the digiboard drivers or can I stick the new
> drivers in 2.0.5 (this has a bearing on whether I spend a day downloading
> stuff over our firewall and pissing everone off because it's a PPP link).

Fun fun!  :-)

... Joe

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Greco - Systems Administrator			      jgreco@ns.sol.net
Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI			   414/342-4847



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