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From: veit@mururoa.gmd.de (Holger Veit)
Subject: Naming convention for tty-like devices
Message-ID: <1993May7.140046.1826@gmd.de>
Sender: veit@mururoa (Holger Veit)
Nntp-Posting-Host: mururoa
Organization: GMD, Sankt Augustin, Germany
Date: Fri, 7 May 1993 14:00:46 GMT
Lines: 51
This seems to be a never-ending story: the problem to
find a homogenous naming convention for tty-like
devices.
Rationale:
1. There are pseudo-tty lines available, named
tty[pqrst][0-f].
2. Currently we have usually two serial lines, named
/dev/com0, com1. Some use com1/com2 instead.
Multi-SIO cards have up to 8 lines (com0-7,com1-8?).
Some serial device drivers have support for
dial-in/dial-out, one convention for that is
to name dial-in lines ttyd[0-f], dial-out lines
cua[0-f]. This is the Sun convention, and it
has the advantage over com0/com1 that 'ps' can
correctly report a login status for the dial-in
lines.
3. Now several implementations of console drivers
with virtual consoles have come up. In order to
be supported by 'ps' they should be called tty(anything)
as well. There are different naming schemes
out there, like
ttyv[0-f] ("virtual"),
ttyc[0-f] ("console"),
tty[0-9][0-9] (SYSV like)
4. The problem seems to be that in 386bsd there is
the com* style for serial lines, whereas in
NetBSD and 386bsd+pk the tty[0-9][0-9] style is
preferred, which will give a name clash to virtual
consoles.
So we should negotiate a naming scheme for all these
devices. My proposal is the following:
pseudo ttys: tty[pqrst][0-9a-f]
dialin serial: ttyd[0-9a-f]
dialout serial: cua[0-9a-f]
non-bidirectional serial: com[0-9a-f] or ttyd[0-9a-f]
virtual consoles: tty[0-9][0-9]
We should discuss this and decide then.
Holger
--
Dr. Holger Veit | INTERNET: Holger.Veit@gmd.de
| | / GMD-SET German National Research | Phone: (+49) 2241 14 2448
|__| / Center for Computer Science | Fax: (+49) 2241 14 2342
| | / P.O. Box 13 16 | Three lines Signature space
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