Subject: Re: [PATCH] Stop pmac_zilog from abusing 8250's device numbers.

From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2007 11:13:12 +1000

On Tue, 2007-04-03 at 20:12 -0400, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-04-03 at 17:02 -0700, David Miller wrote:
> > Sparc does the same thing, it's a common convention and you really
> > should not break it.
> 
> I thought that argument was lost many years ago. It _used_ to be a
> common convention; we got better.
> 
> > Every powerpc and sparc system out that is using ttyS0 with dynamic
> > minor numbers being allocated.  I really think this should be
> > generalized instead of breaking serial on every powerpc machine out
> > there.
> 
> Nobody's breaking anything. The patch _fixes_ serial, and allows powerpc
> machines to use both z8530 and 8250 ports at the same time; something
> which has been broken for a long time.

It worked before the new serial core, we had a "tweak" in the old 8250
driver to be able to share minors, but that got busted when Russell
rewrote the whole thing. I remember asking him back when he still was
the serial maintainer, and he refused to bring back some sharing of
minors.

Ben.