[PATCH] serial: DCC(JTAG) serial and console emulation support

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Wed, 13 Oct 2010, Daniel Walker wrote:

> On Wed, 2010-10-13 at 22:10 +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > On Wednesday 13 October 2010 21:52:02 Daniel Walker wrote:
> > > > Seriously, I don't think you need it, but if you really do, we can probably
> > > > find a way to work around this by changing the base hvc driver.
> > > 
> > > I think we would have to add something that allows different major/minor
> > > numbers, because something that includes the name "Hypervisor" shouldn't
> > > be used for something general.. /dev/hvcX is also registered for "IBM
> > > iSeries/pSeries virtual console" (according to www.lanana.org) which is
> > > confusing ..
> > 
> > That only means we need to update the lanana entry now that the hvc driver
> > is used on nine different platforms (not including yours) instead of ust
> > pSeries. Feel free to come up with a backronym for HVC if you're
> > uncomfortable with the old "hypervisor console" name.
> 
> If you read back in this thread you'll see how there was a discussion
> already on how you shouldn't re-use major/minor numbers for other
> purposes .. It looks like "hvc" was essentially overridden , which now
> seems like a no-no given that discussion.. This appears to be a
> sensitive topic.

And I violently disagree with this interpretation.

The tty layer was probably the first subsystem to have been implemented 
in Linux.  There are a big deal of legacy with its device naming.  When 
adding new subsystems we don't need to perpetuate this. Maybe that made 
sense 20 years ago, but let's leave ttyS0 alone and use good sense for 
new stuff.


Nicolas