Re: Serial driver changes from v5 to v7

Per Hedeland <per@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The defaults are set in the kernel code. You can however see them, and

Ok, I'll plead "not guilty" 8-)

even modify them, via the "init" device - i.e. in 5.x:

stty -a -f /dev/ttyid0

in 6.x and later:

stty -a -f /dev/ttyd0.init

So, an alternative solution to your problem could have been to modify
the settings on the "init" device - but I think this is an inferior
solution since you'll need to have that done on each boot, and it's easy
to forget the relation between that and your use of the port for
printing. Better to have a "robust" printcap entry.

Agreed, the fix should live in printcap.


I'm not sure what you mean by "countable boundary", certainly the ':'
denotes a boundary between capabilities so you can't just insert one
somewhere at random, but the number of ':' doesn't matter since all
So an intermediate : followed by another ms= clause would have been
syntactically correct? As you might guess, I didn't want to try it.

I didn't mean that you are the only one who can debug a serial port
problem:-), but you were the only one that could debug the particular
Understood, but it stands to reason that printers aren't the only serial
devices whose behavior would be altered by the changes in defaults.

The otherwise deafening silence which greeted my queries about serial
ports leads me to believe that their use is approaching (or possibly
past) an end in the FreeBSD community.

At one point I had hopes that my troubles with serial printers might
be related to the "unreliable serial console" problems reported on
the FreeBSD website and would be resolved in 7-CURRENT. That's why I
tried it. Far as I can tell, the two issues were unrelated.

Many, many thanks for your help and patience!

bob prohaska

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