On Sat, Feb 25, 2023 at 06:14:11PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Sat, Feb 25, 2023 at 3:40 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > For what it's worth, in the VM world (e.g., qemu, AWS, GCP, Azure, > > Linode, etc.) serial consoles are quite common way of debugging VM's, > > and as an emergency login path when the networking has been screwed up > > for some reason.... > > Everybody seems to be missing the point. > > We don't make new drivers "default y" (or, in this case, "default SERIAL_8250". > > It does not matter ONE WHIT if you have a serial device in your > machine. If your old driver was enabled and worked for you and you > used it daily, that is ENTIRELY IMMATERIAL to a new driver, even if > that new driver then happens to use some of the same infrastructure as > the old one did. Oh, agreed, I wasn't responding to that part of your message. New serial drivers should never be enabled by default. I was responding to your musing about whether it still made sense to enable the COM1/2/3/4 serial ports by default on x86. It's true that on desktops COM1/2/3/4 serial ports are rarely used, and some other boards might not even have them any more. But for x86 VM's, they are used quite a lot. Cheers, - Ted
