A tempest in a tty pot

"Arguably, no part of the kernel is darker and scarier than the serial terminal (TTY) code. Recently, this code was getting a much-needed update, but it now appears that a disconnect within the community has brought that work to a halt and thrown TTY back into the "unmaintained" column - at a time when that code has known regressions in the 2.6.31-rc kernel.

"At a first glance, the TTY layer wouldn't seem like it should be all that challenging. It is, after all, just a simple char device which is charged with transferring byte-oriented data streams between two well-defined points. But the problem is harder than it looks. Much of the TTY code has roots in ancient hardware implementing the RS-232 standard - one of the loosest, most variable standards out there. TTY drivers also have to monitor the data stream and extract information from it; this duty can include ^S/^Q flow control, parity checking, and detection of control characters. Control characters may turn into out-of-band information which must be communicated to user space; ^D may become an end-of-file when the application reads to the appropriate point in the data stream, while other characters map onto signals. So the TTY code has to deal with complex signal delivery as well - never a path to a simple code base."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Kernel Log: X server 1.7 delayed; Compiz runs on newer Radeon GPUs; DRBD in kernel soon(Aug 06, 2009)
• Alan Cox Quits As Linux TTY Maintainer � "I've Had Enough"(Jul 30, 2009)
• Programming(Aug 12, 2009)
• Coding and the Meaning of Life(Aug 11, 2009)