How does a serial console work? If you can configure a serial console, why can't you configure a serial speech synthesizer? Or does the kernel team have problems with serial consoles too? How does a serial terminal work? On Mar 29, 2013, at 4:59 PM, William Hubbs wrote: > On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 12:11:33PM -0600, William F. Acker WB2FLW +1-303-722-7209 wrote: >> Someone is probably going to launch an ICBM at my house for asking this >> question, but, I wonder if we could ditch serial support. Maybe that could >> be run in user space, and the rest could go into mainline. Do you know if >> it's just the serial stuff they have a problem with? > > Well, the serial code definitely has issues. > > For those who don't know, the issue with speakup's serial code is that > we bypass the kernel's serial port drivers and write directly to the > hardware serial ports. > > This is not good because we have to hard code the ports to write to into > the speakup code. Also it means that our code doesn't work with all > types of serial ports that the kernel supports. > > In order to fix this, it would take working with the serial driver > maintainer in the kernel, at least, and a major rewrite of speakup's > serial code. > > The fastest way to take care of this probably would be to write a daemon > which runs in user space. This daemon would act like espeakup, in the > sense that it would read the /dev/softsynth device, but it would send > output to a serial (or even usb) device that the kernel knows about, e.g. > /dev/ttyS0. > > I have been working on a usb device driver for the tripple talk for a while; > I should get back to finishing that. > > The disadvantage of this of course is that hardware synthesizers then > would be subject to the same limitation as the software synthesizer; you > would have to wait until some point in the boot process when a daemon > could be started before speech would start. I think hardware speech > could start up pretty early; probably around the same time as brltty. > > another issue right now is that when data is sent to the software > synthesizer, on an smp machine, data gets randomly dropped. If you > review the screen everything is there as it should be, but when the data > is initially sent to the synthesizer, parts of it do not get read. > > This hasn't been fixed, because it is extremely difficult to debug and > reproduce. > > Another question is that we still have drivers for old internal ISA > synthesizers, such as the doubletalk pc, dectalk pc, accent pc and > keynote pc. Are these being used? is it even possible to find a machine > any more that supports ISA slots? > > William > > _______________________________________________ > Speakup mailing list > Speakup at linux-speakup.org > http://linux-speakup.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/speakup >
