On Thursday 27 November 2014 13:50:01 Grant Likely wrote: > > Should be sufficient. Basically, if the hardware doesn't exist, the > driver shouldn't be trying to grab the minor numbers. > > Also, on hardware where both exists, there should be some sane > fallback so that all UARTs get assigned numbers. On DT systems we can > also use /aliases to ensure consistent assignment of numbers. >From what I can see, this is really the ISA compatibility code in the 8250 driver, and we should be able to make that optional or even move it into a separate glue driver. Basically the serial8250_init function tries to do a lot of things at once (skipping error handling): serial8250_isa_init_ports(); ret = sunserial_register_minors(&serial8250_reg, UART_NR); serial8250_reg.nr = UART_NR; ret = uart_register_driver(&serial8250_reg); ret = serial8250_pnp_init(); serial8250_isa_devs = platform_device_alloc("serial8250", PLAT8250_DEV_LEGACY); ret = platform_device_add(serial8250_isa_devs); serial8250_register_ports(&serial8250_reg, &serial8250_isa_devs->dev); ret = platform_driver_register(&serial8250_isa_driver); The only thing we want from this is the uart_register_driver() call, everything else is only needed together with the ISA support. The way that uart_register_driver() works unfortunately implies that you know the maximum number of ports at driver init time, which would need to be changed if you want to share the numbers. One idea I had a few years ago when we discussed this was to treat the major 4 allocation differently so you could share it between all sorts of drivers as an opt-in, but could have all unmodified continue using their own device names and numbers. Arnd -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe devicetree" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html