Re: [patch] Incorrect mapping of serial ports to lines

["Maciej W. Rozycki" <macro@linux-mips.org>]

On Tue, 29 Jun 2004, Jun Sun wrote:

> This is why I favor run-time serial port configuration.  My view

 Well, that's certainly a reasonable long-time strategy.

> (maybe a little dramatic) is to remove all static serial port definition
> and push them into board setup routine.  asm/serial.h only needs

 I'm not sure that is the right way of doing it -- note that one problem
is serial drivers can be built as modules and inserted at the run time.

 I haven't looked into the serial I/O subsystem of 2.6, yet, so I don't
know if it offers any support for different wirings of the same U(S)ART.  
In theory I think the most reasonable approach it would be to provide
system-specific frontends to a generic backend for a given U(S)ART (like
an 8250-compatible).  The frontends would handle address mapping, DMA if
available, etc. and be a way to deal with system-specific quirks.

> to define the number serial lines, which itself could be configurable.

 I don't think there needs to be any arbitrary limit here.  With hot-plug
PCI and similar setups ports can appear and disappear from a system at any
time, so the associated resources should be allocated dynamically anyway.

  Maciej