we need a new way to access serial ports

[Kenny Hitt]

Hi.  The best people to answer your questions about a user space daemon would
be the brltty developers.  You can start brltty from initramfs.
It will work with non standard serial ports if you specify them in the config file.
Since it always knows the current contents of the screen, it should have a way to know when the console gets updated.

          Kenny

On Sun, Jun 27, 2010 at 01:00:40PM -0500, Chris Brannon wrote:
> > Is there any way you could open the port from kernel space as though you
> > were in user space and just write to it without taking exclusive
> > control?
> 
> It's not particularly easy to do that.
> Plus, we need a device file, which may not be available when Speakup is
> loaded.
> If we could use device files, we could also work with other kinds of
> serial hardware, like USB-to-serial converters and certain PCI cards.
> 
> Personally, I'd love to see a version of Speakup that runs entirely in
> user-space.  It would be far more flexible and future-proof.
> I'd start the project, but I have too many unanswered questions.
> E.G., how does a user-space daemon know when a new character has been
> written to the console?
> Could the daemon be written in such a way that it can run from initramfs?
> If so, it could still be available early in the boot process.
> But those are just my musings, and I know that quite a few folks wouldn't
> be happy with a user-space implementation.
> 
> -- Chris
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