*BSD News Article 15787


Return to BSD News archive

Xref: sserve comp.os.386bsd.development:697 comp.os.linux:37830
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development,comp.os.linux
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!noc.near.net!uunet!mcsun!news.funet.fi!hydra!klaava!lukka
From: lukka@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Tuomas J Lukka)
Subject: Re: Naming convention for tty-like devices
Message-ID: <1993May7.144628.7429@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Organization: University of Helsinki
References: <1993May7.140046.1826@gmd.de>
Date: Fri, 7 May 1993 14:46:28 GMT
Lines: 63

Sorry for the long repost, I just brought comp.os.linux in on this, because
there has been a lot of talk about this issue in there...

Maybe we could have some common standard on this, in order not to confuse
both of the free (NO FLAMES ABOUT THAT, I MEAN MONEY, NOT FREEDOM!!!!)
unixish OS's.

	TJL

In article <1993May7.140046.1826@gmd.de> veit@mururoa.gmd.de (Holger Veit) writes:
>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