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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!usc!howland.reston.ans.net!ira.uka.de!gmd.de!mururoa!veit 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 | |/ Schloss Birlinghoven | available for rent. Nearly DW-5205 St. Augustin, Germany | unused, good conditions