[TEST/REVIEW/HEADSUP] tty drivers mega-patch

Bruce Evans bde at zeta.org.au
Thu Jul 15 03:33:21 PDT 2004


On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

> In message <20040715171007.X2308 at epsplex.bde.org>, Bruce Evans writes:
> >'i' and 'l' were intentionally not placed at the end, to keep unit
> >numbers at the end and to keep the initial and lock state devices out
> >of the normal device namespace (so ttyd* matches only the data devices).
>
> This makes less sense because it prevent us from using 'i' and 'l'
> as tty driver identifiers.

Indeed.  The namespace seemed to be much larger when I added them
these.  I once planned to rename the world to ttyd* and cuaa*, but
experience showed that putting an indication of the driver name in the
device name is better.

> >> > I would prefer to stick to the "tty" and "cua" prefixes however.
> >
> >Actually, cu* makes considerably more sense and is less of an
> >anachronism than tty (teletypewriter, remember them? (*)).
>
> I think we should be consistent here, I don't like serial
> ports to have names like "ucom" and "uart", "dcons" etc.

Also, (controlling) tty device names must be of the form
"tty<letter><number | letter>" or "console", for ps to
understand and display properly.  Even existing names like /dev/ttyc00
can't be displayed properly in the 2 columns available in ps output.

Bruce


More information about the freebsd-current mailing list