Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 12:13:12 -0700
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
To: Pat Gefre <pfg@sgi.com>
Cc: erikj@subway.americas.sgi.com, rmk+lkml@arm.linux.org.uk, cw@f00f.org,
       hch@infradead.org, jbarnes@engr.sgi.com, pfg@sgi.com,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2.6] Altix serial driver
Message-Id: <20040628121312.75ac9ed7.akpm@osdl.org>
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Pat Gefre <pfg@sgi.com> wrote:
>
> We think we should stick with the major/minor set we have proposed.  We
>  don't like hacking the 8250 code, dynamic allocation doesn't work (once
>  that works we will update our driver to use it), registering for our
>  own major/minor may not work (if we DO get one we will update the
>  driver to reflect it) but in the meantime we need to get something in
>  the community that works.

"we don't like" isn't a very strong argument ;)

It does sound to me like some work is needed in the generic serial layer to
teach it to get its sticky paws off the ttyS0 major/minor if there is no
corresponding hardware.  AFAICT nobody has scoped out exactly what has to
be done for a clean solution there - it may not be very complex.  So could
we please explore that a little further?

If that proves to be impractical for some reason then I'd be inclined to
allocate a new misc minor, stick it in devices.txt and be done with it.
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