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Date:      Thu, 31 Aug 1995 02:20:22 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
To:        peter@nmti.com (Peter da Silva)
Cc:        bde@zeta.org.au, peter@nmti.com, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Gritching about XFree86 and serial port naming
Message-ID:  <199508310720.CAA06311@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
In-Reply-To: <9508302210.AA05015@sonic.nmti.com.nmti.com> from "Peter da Silva" at Aug 30, 95 05:10:14 pm

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> > I would gladly trade that very minor bit of information in exchange for the
> > ability to name 32 serial ports in an easy-to-remember-and-translate
> > fashion.
> 
> Yah.

:-)

> > "Um.  Ok, if I was on ttydf, I should really go to ttye0, but then what do I
> > do with cuaaf, go to cuab0?"
> 
> And why stop at "f" here anyway?

Um, physical->logical mappings?  Most cards tend to end on bit boundaries.
(4, 8, 16 port)  And hex isn't quite as bad as arbitrary-alphanumeric-scheme
when trying to translate in your head.

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.

IMHO:  A "better" solution might label a "controller" channel and a port on
the controller:

tty00-03 = com1-4 (tty04-0? for other non-multiport solutions)
tty10-13 = AST 4 port card (first multiport controller, 4 ports)
tty20-2f = BB2016 16 port card (second multiport controller)
tty30-3f = 2nd BB2016
tty40-47 = generic 8 port card
tty50-5v = 32 port Wonder Card

Etc., which might remind one of how SunOS and other BSD UNIX operating
systems often did things.

The current system is quite flexible and I *really* like that, but it is so
difficult to explain to people how to configure their multiport cards.

How this is implemented at the minor number level and in the kernel config
file is an interesting exercise.

> > Is there anyone else besides me who is looking at putting lots of serial
> > ports on a BSD box, by the way?
> 
> Funny you should mention that. I'm trying to move our current modems (on three
> boxes running two versions of System V) to a FreeBSD box.

Any luck?  :-)

... Joe

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



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