Re: serial callout devices

Theodore Y. Ts'o (tytso@mit.edu)
Mon, 31 May 1999 00:44:46 -0400 (EDT)


From: "Alan Curry" <pacman-kernel@cqc.com>
Date: Sun, 30 May 1999 17:50:11 -0500 (EST)

Last I heard, the ttyS* devices had to be opened O_NONBLOCK for
callout. This is impossible to do from a shell script
(e.g. ppp-on). So the cua* devices are still useful to people who
don't want to rewrite their dialup scripts.

It's not hard to rewrite your dialup script so that pppd takes care of
opening the device and doing the device locking for you. Yes, I realize
that some people are lazy, and any change is going to be too much work
for them. But this is why I'm giving people plenty of notice that cua
devices *will* be going away so that they have time to rewrite their
scripts.

(And yes, I use a /dev/modem symlink too. Change one symlink instead of
reconfiguring $BIGNUM different programs)

I don't have as much of a problem against a /dev/modem symlink, although
I will mention the obvious problem that it doesn't scale if you have
more than one modem. You can also get screwed if you want to use the
internal modem on a laptop (say, a Sony Vaio, for example), but the only
ethernet PCMCIA card you have is a combo card. When you insert the
ethernet card, the PCMCIA software will very helpfully redirect the
/dev/modem symlink to the modem on the PCMCIA card --- which is not
necessarily what you might have wanted.

- Ted

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