Building serial_cs.ko

[Nathan M]

> Got it, and ah.  This is where it gets impossible.  The PXA driver
> re-uses the 8250 drivers namespace (major 4 minor 64 upwards,
> /dev/ttyS0 to ttyS63).

wonderfull

> The effect of that is that the PXA serial driver and 8250 serial
> drivers can not co-exist.  This means if you're using a PXA device
> you have an exclusive choice of using the on-board serial ports
> _OR_ supporting 8250-compatible PCMCIA modems.

my application unfortunately requires the use of both, hmmm...

> There's no way round this other than by changing the namespace which
> the PXA driver uses, which means you're going to have to add extra
> device nodes to your root filesystem and alter the device nodes which
> your getty's listen on.  All gets rather complicated I'm afraid.
> 
> (I did try to explain this issue to the PXA folk, and they came up
> with a horrible set of patches which _hacked_ around the problem,
> introducing special cases... which I quite rightfully ignored.)
> 
> In other words, what you're suffering from is a stalemate situation
> between the PXA folk and me.  Sorry.

Hmm, at least i'm not the only one with this issue.  In any case I do
need to accomplish the near impossible here and have both serial and
PCMCIA serial active.  Given the PXA folk haven't done much good on
their side, is there a way to patch 8250 such as to prevent the
namespace conflict?  You'd have to provide a patch or walk me through
most of this as this goes outside my area of expertise (I've designed
PC/104 add-on boards that use 16550 UARTs before, but never had to
touch the driver source).  Not sure how much time you'd be able or
willing to invest.  Any other ideas?

Thanks.

-Nathan M