Re: Unix98 PTYs and Changes/devices.txt

H. Peter Anvin (hpa@transmeta.com)
28 Nov 1998 06:10:45 GMT

Followup to: <Pine.LNX.4.05.9811280030340.331-100000@tahallah.demon.co.uk>
By author: Alex Buell <alex.buell@tahallah.demon.co.uk>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> i'm trying to figure out the changes that needs to be made to /dev/** to
> enable this feature to work.
>
> I completely shagged the /dev/tty* stuff following the information
> contained in Changes/devices.txt in Documentation.
>
> It seems that Slack_whore_ (3.1 which was the original installation on
> this machine) defines /dev/ttyN as members of character device major 4.
> The Changes says to create ttyN as device major 3. Huh? What gives? Yet
> again, the device.txt presents conflicting information, so I'm
> thoroughtly confused now. :/ If I change to major 3, agetty/init gets very
> unhappy.
>

Slackware is using a royally obsolete configuration (pretty
characteristic of that distribution, by the way.) These devices have
been obsolete since 1995.

> Is there any resources out there which explains this better?
>
> Also, X complains about not being allowed to operate upon /dev/ttypN
> devices - this was what prompted me to investigate and try and solve it.

This is because the X clients you have are using the BSD API, not the
Unix98 one. BSD-API programs still use /dev/[pt]typ* etc.

> And yes, I do have glibc-2.0.104 installed.

-hpa

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