From: nathan@sdf.lonestar.org (Nathan Laredo) Subject: Re: [NEW]: The Linux Device List Date: 13 May 1993 15:52:50 GMT
In article <C6vzwr.64M@lysator.liu.se> pen@lysator.liu.se (Peter Eriksson) writes:
>nathan@sdf.lonestar.org (Nathan Laredo) writes:
>
>>>>> tty[a-d] for the `standard' 4 ports
>>>>> tty[e-o][0-f] for multi-port cards (ie tty<card><port>)
>>>
>>>>Anyone else like this idea?
>>>
>>>I prefer this scheme too. My vote would go for it.
>
>>Uh-huh.. and what happens to someone with 32 ports on one device
>
>(. Big problem .) Make it "tty[e-o][0-z]" then. That would give you
>36 ports/card. If you have a card with more that 36 ports then I suggest
Actually I've never seen more than 36 ports on anything that connected
any other way than through ethernet... I would love to move my dialups
off to a Xylogics tcpip terminal box, but I can't afford those things
yet as they cost more than a good 486 system.
As far as being interrupted to death with that many ports... any respectable
interface that includes a large number of serial ports might include its
own RAM on board to buffer up say 1k at a time (if all ports were set
to high speed) for each individual port before triggering an interrupt,
at which time controlling software would know how to get the full 1K
off the custom board... in other words, it doesn't look like a serial
port in the UART sense, but hell, someone could even put such a device
on a SCSI bus if they were determined enough.
In any case, I don't particularly care for the linux "standard"
device list, so I have my "standard" (in fact there's absolutely
no reason to follow anyone... that's the philosophy as far as I
know behind linux)
My system is setup to appear identical to a Solaris 2.0 system
because that's the way I like it. My devices are named appropriately.
It's been since linux 0.12 that I've taken this approach, and it's
paid off in the installations that I have done for other people as
they can just consult SunOS 4.1.3 as a reference that they usually
already know, which makes the transition much easier and saves the
cost of a sparc (yeah I know a classic is in the $3k range now, but
that's solaris 2.1 and it's also more than the $800 for a machine
to run linux)
-- Nathan