Re: continuing setserial problems

["Theodore Y. Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>]

   From: Adam Di Carlo <adam@onshore.com>
   Date: Tue, 06 Jul 1999 02:19:00 -0400

   Hmm... the implication here is that unless Sparc64 supports ISA
   hardware compatability, basically, setserial is not really of any use
   without specific patches to setserial use different ioctls?  Or am I
   misreading you there?

   I assume you aren't saying ISA hardware compatabilty is required for
   setserial to be useful at all, since that would mean it wouldn't be
   useful on any platform but i386 and maybe Alpha...

Setserial uses device-driver-specific ioctl's for setting driver
settings which are specific to (mostly) drivers/char/serial.c.  The
"mostly" bit is because there are a few other serial drivers which have
chosen to use the same ioctl interface (the Hayes ESP and the Cyclades
driver come to mind), although the ioctl interface was never designed to
be a generic serial driver interface --- the Cyclades drivers used the
ioctl interface without consulting with me first.

Setserial is only useful if the serial device drivers actually implement
the ioctl interface.  There is no requirement that drivers implement
it; and in fact many hardware devices may not be able to support some or
all of the functionality exposed by that interface.

The primary interface used by programs when programming the serial
interface is the POSIX termios interface; nothing else is guaranteed to
work.

						- Ted