Re: no ioctls for serial ports? [was Re: LANANA: To Pending DeviceNum

[Alexander Viro]

On Mon, 21 May 2001, Oliver Xymoron wrote:

> K - so what? I'm guessing what you want me to see is that these
> implement multiple channels. Is there a reason that eia001stat couldn't be
> implemented as
> 
>  f=open("/dev/eia001ctl",O_RDWR);
>  write(f,"stat\n");
>  status=read(f); /* returns "stat foo\n" */

Less convenient.

> We don't want to implement a separate device node for every OOB ioctl that
> returns data, do we? Why should stat be any different?

For every? Probably not. Forcing all of them together? I bet that in many
cases it will be damn inconvenient. You are forcing the policy on all
drivers. For no good reason, AFAICS.

> /dev/draw is interesting but largely irrelevant. And again, colormap and
> refresh - why are they not part of ctl? You've got to select on refresh
> anyway, might as well accept asynchronous messages through ctl.

You've got to do _what_ on refresh?