Re: [MiNT] Detecting serial-devices

[Katherine Ellis <kellis@leading.net>]

Hi Jo, Frank and all:

Wouldn't it be a "good" idea to have:

a scanner program that you run once for all (unless you change machine),
and writes the result into a /etc/files for example?
How many times do you really upgrade your atari, and/or serial ports?

So like that, for 5 min it could totally lock the machine (when scanning)
who cares, but then you have a flat files with all the info wished.

It is not fully 100% realtime, but probably more flexible.
The only time you would need to run the scanner would be initialy, then if
the file gets corrupted (plain ascii is quite easy to see), and when
upgrading machine/hardware.

Thanks.


On Thu, 7 Oct 1999
Jo-Even.Skarstein@gjensidige.no wrote:

> Hi!
> 
> This is an excerpt from a discussion between Frank Naumann and myself:
> 
> -----------8<-----------
> 
> > Fine by me. But I can see one disadvantage in using ioctls in the first
> > place - you'll have to open the device first. This means (AFAIK) that you
> > can't get any information on locked devices. Not a big problem though, but
> > something like Dpathconf() on /dev (like you suggested) would be nice to
> > have. It doesn't have to be restricted to serialdevices either, although I
> > don't have any specific ideas for other uses (yet).
> 
> Hmm, better we discuss this on the MiNT-List.
> 
> Tschuess
>    ...Frank
> 
> --------------8<-----------
> 
> The basic idea is to have some call (or perhaps an extension to existing
> calls if that's more appropriate) to retrieve information about devices (in
> this case serial-devices) without opening them. Does anybody have any
> thoughts about this?
> 
> It would be very handy to have something like this, especially when creating
> GUIs where you have to present a set of valid arguments or values to the
> user. Using ioctls has the disadvantage that you won't be able to get
> information about locked devices, and also that you will lock the device
> during your query.
> 
> 
> Jo Even Skarstein
> 
> 

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MiNT Is Now TOS, let's move on, shall we?  /
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